Angels and Insects
by notmanos
Summary: Post X2: After an incident garners the XMen unwanted attention, Logan decides to drop out for a while, even though the team is in tatters. But unbeknowst to him, he's being hunted by the Vantha who have very strange plans in mind for him.
1. Part 1

Disclaimer:The character of Logan & all X Men is owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright infringement intended. Bob is still mine - hands off, or he will remove them for you.  
  
N.B.: Takes place shortly after the "X2" movie, and right after Gakido.  
  
*****  
  
ANGELS AND INSECTS  
  
*****  
  
1  
  
  
  
Seriously, how low did a person have to go to end up in a place like this?  
  
Logan shook his head and braced himself as he walked in the door, ready for anything.  
  
It was a small place, cozy almost, brightly lit and done up in muted colors, ivory and pale celery green, with wooden tables as round as saucers filling up the middle of the room, and a few "rustic" looking wooden booths in the back, by the picture windows. Enya played softly on the sound system, and just to the right of the door, an older man who looked like a lascivious English professor and a somewhat plain brunette in a maroon turtleneck and long gray skirt were both eating something that looked grilled and sipping glasses of white wine, discussing how pedestrian the MOMA had come, desperately trying to out pretentious each other. Logan had to tamp down the urge to just go over there and smack them, and demand that they either just do each other on the table right now or get the fuck out - either way, just spare everyone their upper class twit of the year mating dance.  
  
Jesus fucking Christ. Scott couldn't even do this right. He had come to a fern bar to get bombed.  
  
He was just going to turn around and leave, tell Bob he couldn't find him, but then he caught sight of him, hunched down in one of the padded wooden benches in the corner, looking miserable, and he knew if Bob saw his memories, he'd catch that too. Damn it.  
  
He stalked over to the booth and threw himself in the bench seat across from him, all the while giving him a dirty look that Scott didn't bother to look up to see. "What the fuck are you doing here?" Logan demanded. "There's a sleazy bar just five blocks over where they serve real booze and have never had a customer who drives a Saab."  
  
Scott lifted his head slowly, as if it weighed a ton. "Go away," he said thickly, determined to be miserable.  
  
"If you're gonna do this, do this right," he insisted. "No one can get a good self-pity drunk on with red wine alone."  
  
"I am not bein' self-piteous," Scott insisted, drawing his half filled glass close to him. Somehow he was slightly drunk, and he just reeked of wine. Fuck, what a lightweight. "D-do you know what that fucking friend of yours - "  
  
"He's not my friend," Logan snapped automatically. Then he was at a loss what to say. "Okay, maybe, kinda."  
  
"Do you know about Jean?"   
  
"Yeah."  
  
"When did you know?" He asked accusingly, leaning his elbows on a table. He looked like he was about to collapse face forward onto it. Logan just knew it; Scott was one of those guys who probably only had drinks on special occasions - a glass of wine with dinner on Thanksgiving, a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve - who never built up a real tolerance for it, and could probably get a good buzz off a box of chocolate liqueurs. Although Logan knew it was pathetic, he envied him getting a buzz off anything - that was a feat he couldn't master.  
  
"A few minutes ago, when I was back at the mansion and Bob told me," he lied, deciding he really didn't need to know the details. It'd only make him more upset, and he hadn't had any intention of telling him even when he was sober. "Why the fuck did you quit the X-Men?"  
  
Suddenly a slim hipped, bright eyed Pakistani waitress showed up at their table. "Hello," she said, with a heavily caffeinated brightness, pulling a small notepad and pencil seemingly from out of nowhere. "Would you like a menu?"  
  
Logan stared at her in disbelief. Was she not picking up his "fuck off" vibe? Not that he could work up a good rant against her - she was probably just a college student supplementing her income with a shitty job, and it wasn't her fault she had a boy's hips.  
  
"Yes," Scott said, holding up his glass. "I want more of … this. Whatever this is." A ray of light from the window caught the bell of the glass, making the wine in it shine like liquid rubies. Its red shadow spilled over the wood grain table like a bloodstain.  
  
Her doe eyes seemed to lose a little of their luster when she glanced at Scott. She had no experience dealing with the sloshed, or did she just not like them? "Sir, we have a -" She hesitated, not sure how to let him down.  
  
"Give me a grilled cheese sandwich," Logan interjected, deciding to be kind to her and give her an excuse to leave. Scott wouldn't realize he wasn't getting another drink.  
  
She turned her nervous attention to the pad in her hand, and said, "All right. What kind of bread would you like? Brioche, baguette, cracked wheat, sourdough rye, sundried tomato and thyme, honey - "  
  
"Bread," he interrupted impatiently. He now regretted trying to save her skinny ass. "Just bread. I don't care what kind." At her honestly uncomprehending look - oh, these goddamn Yuppie pits - he said, "The first one."  
  
"All right," she agreed, scribbling it down. "What kind of cheese? Brie, gruyere, goat's milk Romano, Swiss - "  
  
"The yellow kind," he snapped. He gave her a molten look, and hoped she'd get the message.   
  
Her brown eyes widened, and he caught a slight whiff of fear off of her - was his look that intimidating? Or maybe it was just him - he didn't look like he belonged here. Scott could pass, but Logan knew he looked far too low class to be in the same zip code as a place like this. "An-anything to drink?" She stammered, taking a step back from the table.  
  
"Yeah, this," Scott repeated, tapping the glass with his finger.  
  
"No, I'm good."  
  
"Very good," she squeaked, and hurried away.  
  
Scott scoffed. "Isn't she high strung?" He then gave him a curious look. "You like grilled cheese sandwiches?"   
  
Logan sighed, and dry washed his face. What he wanted to do was punch the table down, shove Scott through the window, pick him up by his nape and drag him back to the mansion - he could. It would take mere minutes, and surely he had the money to cover the damage.   
  
"Why did you leave the X-Men?" He repeated, deciding not to mention that the last time he could remember having a grilled cheese sandwich, it was in an all night truck stop in British Columbia, in the company of a dying geneticist who packed a mean set of pistols, several minutes before a corporate funded army tore the dump up. There were just some facts that weren't helpful.  
  
Scott sighed and slumped back against his seat, looking like a slowly deflating mannequin. "I can't do it anymore. You lead 'em."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"I can't … I don't wanna. I can't take people dyin' on me."  
  
"Jean didn't die."  
  
"But Cressida did," he said, suddenly getting angry. "And I thought Jean had. I can't … I'm not like you. I can't just shrug death off."  
  
Logan scowled at the insult, but decided not to get into it. If he was gonna chew Scott a new one, he wanted him sober when he did it. "You can't be that naïve, Scott. You knew bein' a leader of any group, you're gonna suffer casualties at some point. At some point, you will knowingly send your people into a situation where they will most likely die." Logan suddenly felt a chill of déjà vu, and wasn't completely sure why. Had he had this discussion before, or had he done it before? Both?  
  
Scott shook his head so vehemently he almost fell over and knocked his own visor off. "No, no, there's no situation where death is the only possible outcome. There's always another way - "  
  
"No there isn't."  
  
"Yes there is," he angrily insisted. "It's a failure of imagination if - "  
  
"Why do you think I run no win scenarios in the danger room?" He interrupted, trying to suppress the urge to ram Scott's stubborn head into the table. "Do you wanna know how many of those I've been in in my life? Too fuckin' many."  
  
"But you're still alive."  
  
"Only 'cause my healin' factor won't let me stay dead. Does anyone else have that luxury?" Scott looked away, his jaw muscles working like he was chewing on walnuts. "And let me point somethin' else out here, Captain Queeg - your troops have minds of their own. Jean made that decision on her own - " Well, as far as they knew. " - and Cressida did the same damn thing. I know for damn sure I'd a done the same thing she did - kill those fucking things, no matter the cost. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do."  
  
"But that's part of the problem, isn't it?" Scott exclaimed, throwing his hands wide. He almost knocked over his wine glass. "She figured out a way to kill them. She also figured out a way to get us all out of there. Did I? No, I didn't. I failed them. Cressida was a better leader than I was. She'd never even have any training, and yet she knew exactly what to do while I was still figuring out what was going on."  
  
Oh god, was some of this just an ego thing? He rolled his eyes, and said, "Look - she was an operative. They don't lead, they generally work on their own. She was working for herself, not you - it just happened to help you. And what you gotta understand is that we were trained to improvise; you train fine, Scott, but yer rigid. I wish things were as cut and dried as you seem to think they are, but you gotta know by now the world is completely fucking nuts - anything can happen at any time. There's no way to be prepared for every possibility, but you do the best you can."  
  
Scott stared at him for a long moment, head canted to the side, and he looked about five degrees from listing over completely. "This is why you should lead them for a while, Logan. I'm tired."  
  
He shook his head. "I'm a solo act."  
  
"Why? You could do a better job than me." He had a petulant look on his face. Drunks and their mood swings.  
  
"Says who? Kid, I don't want the job."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
" 'Cause I don't. As I said, solo. I don't know if you've noticed, but I don't play well with others."  
  
Scott frowned, his synapses firing at a rather slow rate. "Why'd you call me Captain Queeg?"  
  
"Let's go home - I'll tell you there."  
  
His frown deepened, gouging lines in his narrow face. "I don't have a home."  
  
"Yes you do. Now let's get outta here before they evict me for thinking Picasso's a dick." He dug in his pants pocket for his wallet, aware that he'd never bothered to get an i.d., not even a driver's license, and all his wallet ever had in it was cash and scraps of paper. But how did you get one when you didn't even have a birth certificate? One of these days, he knew he was going to have to take Marcus up on making a good fake driver's license for him. But what would he put as his last name? Or first name, if he decided Logan was his last?  
  
Was that i.d. he made for him in Santo Marco still good? Logan Hunter? That sounded generic enough - he could probably live with that, if he had to have any official identity at all.  
  
"Bob is … he's a lying, stinking weasel who let that … fucking thing take Jean … " Scott said, apparently unconcerned that this wasn't connected to anything else.   
  
"No he didn't."  
  
Scott ignored him; he was on a roll. "He knew that … thing couldn't be trusted, that … it'd want blood - "  
  
"Did you want Fenrir to take over?" He interrupted impatiently.  
  
That seemed to throw him for a moment. Logan waited for his hopelessly besotted synapses to fire and put it all together. "No … " he finally admitted, sounding as if he wasn't sure who Fenrir actually was.  
  
"I've had access to Bob's mind - that runs both ways. And I know he thought he was doing the only thing he could; he didn't wanna, but he kinda had to. And he knew he might pay for it in the end, but he never once thought that any of you would. If he wasn't recovering in the higher realms - which Camaxtli knew, I might add - it woulda never happened. Bob likes Humans - don't ask me why, but he does. He'd never hurt 'em." Especially not one I love, he thought, but there was no fucking way he was saying that to Scott.  
  
Scott finally scoffed, shaking his head in such a loose way it looked like it was about to fall off his shoulders. "Of course you're gonna say that … "  
  
"Look at me," Logan demanded, and Scott did, snapping to out of reflex. "If I thought for a second that Bob hurt Jean, I would find a way to kill him." He let that sink in before he asked, "Do you doubt that?"  
  
Scott's slim jaw seemed to go taut with tension once more, and eventually he shook his head, his limp brown hair flopping onto his pasty brow. "No. And that's why you're so fucking scary sometimes."  
  
Logan just shrugged. It was fair enough.  
  
"You know, I was hoping you would do that to me," Scott went on, as Logan pulled out some cash and stuck his wallet back in his pocket. "When I was brainwashed, and attacking Jean at the dam. Not kill me, but sneak up on me, put me down. I figured if anyone would deliberately attack me, it would be you, 'specially if I was tryin' to hurt her."  
  
Logan really didn't know what to say to that. It was probably an insult, but given the circumstances, somewhat mitigated. "Get up," he snapped, doing just that himself.  
  
"Why?"   
  
" 'Cause we're leavin'."  
  
"I don't wanna leave," he said petulantly. "I haven't gotten my refill yet."  
  
"And you ain't gonna get one, sunshine. We're approximately five minutes away from bein' officially evicted by the cops - do ya really want that?" Okay, a lie, but probably not much of one; and in spite of being bombed, Scott was always a Boy Scout at heart. He wouldn't want trouble.  
  
Scott groaned as if in pain, and shoved himself up, so unsteady he stumbled over his own feet, and Logan had to catch him so he didn't plummet face down onto the floor. "I'm good," he instantly claimed, clearly not. Logan shoved him back upright, and watched Scott waver for a minute before he seemed to find his center of balance again.  
  
The waitress was coming over, holding the world's fanciest (and undoubtedly most expensive) grilled cheese sandwich on a tray, and her dark eyes were still full of trepidation as he held out a fifty dollar bill towards her. "Will this cover the bill?"  
  
"Hey, I got money," Scott protested, and then commenced a fumbling search for his wallet.  
  
Some of the fear died in her eyes as she realized the denomination of the cash. "Yes, certainly. Are you leaving? What about your sandwich?"  
  
"Bag it up. There's a homeless guy selling newspapers two blocks South of here - take it to him after your shift is over. Consider the change the delivery money." She looked startled by the request, but accepted the money, and as soon as she did, he grabbed Scott's shoulder and pulled him out of the fern bar.  
  
"You really feel for them, don't you?" Scott said, as the humidity of the outside air hit them like a fist. What was it about New York, especially in the city? It was like the devil's armpit - the air was so moist and dense you could almost cut pieces out of it. The sky was actually overcast, flimsy gray clouds blocking the sun, but it did nothing to lessen the moisture sucking intensity of the atmosphere. "It's 'cause you were one of them, right? You were homeless when we found you. Have you ever had a home?"  
  
"Shut up," he replied, dragging him through the streets. The sidewalks were reasonably populated - as they usually were in New York City -but as was also typical, people parted before him like the Red Sea. Maybe that was the one good thing about the hair.   
  
Scott didn't take the hint though - again. "Ya know, I was always worried I'd end up like that, you know. Growing up I never really had a home. And now I've walked out on the only one I've really ever had - "  
  
But he'd barely dragged him half a block when he was forced to stop - how the fuck was he going to get him back to the mansion on his bike? "Did you bring your car?" He asked Scott.  
  
Scott pulled his arm out of his grip, nearly stumbling from the effort of it. "I'm not going back there."  
  
He was not arguing with a drunk imbecile. "I'm taking you to a proper bar, dickhead." Of course he'd never be seen in a proper bar with Scott, but he was hoping he was too slow on the uptake to figure that out.  
  
After a moment, he said sourly, "There's no need to call names."  
  
He could deck him right now, and he'd probably be too drunk to remember who hit him later on. He could tell him anything - he pulled his scrawny ass out of a fight. Sure, that would work, and give him a serious case of the guilts too.  
  
Just as he was considering whether to give him a right hook or just a head butt, Logan heard the noise. It was the usual screech of brakes and chorus of honks that made up the New York City audioscape, but then there was a strange noise, like damped explosions - pop, pop.   
  
And that's when the screaming started.  
  
No matter that it was at least a block over, Scott finally heard it too. His head snapped around violently, and he started heading up the street, just as others started surging down it the opposite way. "Hey," Logan griped, struggling against the crowd to catch up to him. Drunk or not, he now had purpose, and that gave him a bit more steadiness than he had before. "What the fuck are you doing?"  
  
"They might need our help," Scott explained, nearly losing his balance again.  
  
"You couldn't help yourself out the door," Logan pointed out. But of course the nuance was lost on the wino.  
  
Scott still went around the corner, battling against the throng eager to leave the vicinity (in other words, the sensible people), and Logan joined him, just in time to see what was going on.  
  
A Brink's armored truck was laying on its side in the middle of the street, and on top of it was standing a big, muscular man who was firing some kind of blasts from his hands towards what must have been a police escort vehicle, parked parallel to the truck in the center of the road. Two cops were trying to take shelter behind the car, but it was flimsy protection, especially when a reasonably attractive dark skinned woman - who must have been blaster boy's accomplice - picked up a parked sedan by a single hand - like it weighed no more than an empty cardboard box - and brought it crashing down on the police car, flattening it like a pancake. The cops scattered, and the crowd that had been gathered to watch the show suddenly realized their safe distance wasn't far enough away.   
  
"Mutants," Scott muttered, pointing out the perfectly obvious.  
  
"No shit." In fact, didn't blaster boy look curiously familiar? Where had he seen him before?  
  
Scott took aim and a coherent red beam of energy lanced out from his visor and hit the blaster in the chest. Maybe because he was drunk Scott's aim was a little off, and he only clipped the guy's torso, but it was enough to send him flying off the side of the truck. More chaos ensued, as now the cops didn't know who to aim their guns at, the crowd no longer knew where a safe place was, and the she hulk went from shocked to pissed in an instant, but was smart enough to dodge behind the truck, so Scott couldn't shoot her too.  
  
Scott, of course, forged ahead before Logan could grab him and yank him out of here. It was then that someone fell into Logan, and his irritation faded as he realized he smelled blood.  
  
It was a guy in a uniform, probably one of the Brink's guys, glassy eyed and bleeding from a massive gash on his forehead that painted half his face in red. His left hand was hanging limp at an odd angle, suggesting something was broken. "I'm - I never saw them - " the guy said, clearly mistaking him for someone who cared. But he probably had a concussion too, and was just wandering in a sense that he should do something, but he no longer had any idea what.  
  
Logan took him by the shoulders and moved him aside, propping him up against the nearest building so at least, if he passed out, he wouldn't be trampled by the crowd. "Stay here," he told him firmly, aware that the dazed usually responded to some sense of authority. "An aid car's prob'ly on the way, so don't move, and keep low."  
  
The guy just stared through him for a moment, his eyes refusing to focus, as blood continued to drip over his thick lips and stain the front of his uniform shirt. He looked worse than he was; a few stitches, a cast, and some rest, and he'd be as good as new. It just didn't seem like that right now.  
  
Logan heard more crashing, more glass breaking and metal bending behind him, and cops randomly shouting, "Freeze! Goddamn it motherfuckers, all of you freeze!" From the continued sounds of destruction and mayhem, not a single motherfucker was listening to them.  
  
"Who are you?" The guard asked, apparently getting the idea that he wasn't just a random civilian, even in his semi-conscious state.  
  
He heard Scott shout, "Hey, stop that now!" Oh yes, that was brilliant - had the cops ever thought to just tell the hijackers to stop? They could have saved themselves so much time and trouble if they just told them to knock it off. Logan shook his head, wondering if he could just leave him here to get his ass folded, spindled, and mutilated, and then perforated by the jumpy cops. Well, he could, but Bob might give him a guilt trip about it. Shit.  
  
Logan glanced at the guard, and grumbled, "I'm with stupid."   
  
As he turned to face the chaos, he wondered - after this was all over - if he could just dump Scott in the Bronx. 


	2. Part 2

Scott finally noticed the cops aiming their weapons at him, and he stopped before he stepped out into the wreckage strewn street. "I'm a good guy," he told them, honestly puzzled to be in their sights.  
  
"Hands behind your head, mutie," one of the cops shouted, trying to take shelter behind a free standing mailbox at the end of the street across the way. "Face away from us and get on your knees."  
  
"But I'm a good guy," Scott explained, still not getting it - the cops assumed they were all hostile. It was the "Shoot 'em all and let god - or their lawyers - sort 'em out" policy, one that Logan was very familiar with. It only proved how much Scott hadn't lived in the outside world to not know that cops were instantly hyper-suspicious of mutants.  
  
Blaster boy must have recovered, because suddenly a beam of coherent whitish yellow light shot out from behind the truck, and nailed Scott in the shoulder, throwing him back into the wall of the nearest building. Scott groaned, so he was obviously still conscious, but just barely.  
  
Logan shook his head and slipped into a narrow alley between buildings (why did they always reek of human piss? Actually, he knew why - it was simply rhetorical) and popped his claws. These were all tall buildings, but he slammed his claw in, got a grip, and started climbing - he didn't need to climb to the top (he'd be climbing all day if that was the case), he just needed to get high enough to survey the scene, and get the drop on them, if possible.  
  
One of the cops down on the street opened fire, which was a stupid thing to do, because blaster boy started shooting at all of them in return - with rays, not bullets - and the mailbox that one cop was hiding behind went airborne, crashing into a cab on the cross street. There was no obvious sign of the cop who had been hiding behind it.  
  
A red beam shot out and clipped the armored truck, hitting it hard enough to make it skid across the asphalt, raising sparks. Scott wasn't completely out of it yet.  
  
Logan sensed eyes on his back, and looked over his shoulder to see a little kid in the window of the neighboring building, staring at him in goggle eyed shock. What, a lot of claw guys didn't climb the outside of old hotels? As soon as he met the kid's eyes, the kid darted away from the window, so fast the curtains wavered in the breeze of his wake. He almost felt like shouting "Sorry,", but ah hell, who was he kidding? He wasn't sorry - what he wanted to do was beat Scott's ass for pulling them into this little detour.  
  
Looking down, Logan saw he was about five stories up, not nearly far enough, but close. Down below, the street was lit up like Christmas, and the crackle of police radios were calling out desperately for SWAT support, air support - any kind of fucking support, as long as it was heavy duty and got here right now. It was easy to see why; Blaster boy was shooting coherent beams, as was Scott, and they met in the middle, rivers of energy splashing up against once another and canceling each other out. He could feel the backwash from here, more intensity than heat, making the hairs on his arms stand on end, but he bet it was making the normals down their shit their pants.  
  
Scott had accidentally stumbled on a good strategy - he could throw coherent energy at this clown all day, but Logan had only seen this guy use bursts, and he was sure Scott could wear him down, make him exhaust his own personal energy supply. But just because he saw him use bursts didn't mean he only had the energy for that - he'd seen Scott uses bursts almost exclusively, but not because he didn't have the energy for more; still, Logan had the curious feeling he was right.   
  
He knew Blaster Boy, didn't he? Shit, he was sure he did …  
  
But he had no time to continue wracking his brain; he could see she hulk was on the move, probably picking up a car to throw at Scott. He quickly scrambled up the side of the building as quickly as he dared (although no fall was going to hurt him), hoping to get enough height to make a leap even possible.  
  
He jammed his claws into the façade like pitons, moving around towards the front of the street, as Blaster seemed to be weakening under the strain, and the Hulkette picked up the sedan she had previously used to crush the cop car, and threw it at Scott. Logan was out of time.  
  
With all the strength he could muster, he jumped off the side of the building, claws extended, aimed like a missile towards the car.  
  
He almost didn't meet it in time. It was close enough to Scott to nearly make him flinch, but Logan slammed into it, claws slicing through it like it was make of rice paper, and some kind of hydraulic fluid splattered as the trunk scissored off the car, and the two pieces, with thwarted momentum, tumbled to the street, short of its target (but the big half rolled, and nearly hit Scott - luckily he was far too drunk to notice).  
  
Logan knew his own momentum had been fucked up, and there was no way he could land on his feet, so he tucked and rolled, hitting the pavement hard enough to lose most of his breathe in a whoosh, but he stayed in form, and managed to roll up neatly onto his feet, like the whole thing had been choreographed ahead of time. It would have been cooler if he wasn't completely turned around, but he heard someone mutter an awestruck , "Fuck," as he spun to face the Strong Lady, hands and claws spread out at his side.  
  
Blaster Boy knew he'd been beaten; his energy was dying fast, and Scott's energy was starting to push him back, up onto the sidewalk across the way. The woman looked at him with a snarl, reaching for the flattened police car, and Logan simply motioned for her to bring it on, as whatever she could hit him with he could avoid or cut to ribbons. Was her skin as strong as her muscles? Her sneer seemed to falter, as she must have realized that this wasn't a promising proposition. Ideally, Blaster Boy could take him out, but the second he turned his attention away from Scott, he was smashed like a pancake. And she could throw crap at him all day … but it wouldn't make a fucking bit of difference.  
  
He started stalking towards her slowly, waiting for her to commit herself to a move. She seemed reluctant to do so, understanding it would leave her open to a move direct assault. She could probably throw him into a low earth orbit, being as strong as she obviously was - but immune to the claws? Probably not. It didn't look like she had adamantium skin.  
  
The air was cut with the percussive thump of rotors - a helicopter was on its way - and that's when the mutant Bonnie and Clyde decided to call it. "Neimi," Blaster shouted. "Out."  
  
With that, she moved fast, and Logan's sudden recognition of the voice - fuck, he knew that man's voice - made him pause, and that may have been all they needed.   
  
She ran behind the armored truck and suddenly shoved it violently towards Scott, cutting off the beam inexorably making its way towards her friend, but since Scott was still firing, his optic beam hit the truck and shoved it back so violently it shot sparks before smashing into the building across the way, breaking the façade and causing windows to shatter for several floors, raining glass down on the street.   
  
"Oops," Scott said, knocking it off. If he hadn't, he could have put the truck completely through the building and knocked it all down.  
  
Logan ran and jumped up on the top of the armored truck, looking around for any sign of them. In a perfect world, they would have been splattered by the armored truck, but if they were quick enough, they could have outrun it - and wasn't there a narrow cut through between the buildings?  
  
"Freeze, goddamn it!" One of the cops shouted through a bullhorn, as Logan caught their scent, and heard the noise of them running in the opposite direction. He did know Blaster Boy - he was one of Reaper's men. He was the fuck who shot concussive blasts through his hands, the one who helped kidnap him (and helped nearly kill Marc) back in Montana. He forgave himself for not recognizing him because he'd dyed his hair and lost some weight, and he hadn't caught his smell until now, but it still seemed unforgivable. As he moved across the truck, towards the alley entrance, the bullhorn cop yelled, "Stop or I will fucking shoot you!"  
  
Logan glared at them in exasperation, pointing down the alley. "They're getting away, assholes!"  
  
"Put the weapons down!" The cop behind the bullhorn had a bullet shaped head and a square jaw, and was built like a Marine, with small eyes like pinholes, his face flushed from shouting. He was giving off a "fuck you" vibe that clearly suggested he was beyond reason, and just ready to start shooting.  
  
Logan rolled his eyes. Not this again.  
  
"He can't," Scott said helpfully, still unsteady on his feet. "If he could, don't you think he would have?"  
  
"You, face away," Bullhorn barked. Now without the massive power display happening, cops started creeping out of the rubbernecking crowd, but they were edgy, guns drawn and ready to dive for cover the instant anyone coughed. "Hands behind your head!"  
  
Scott looked flabbergasted. "We're the good guys!"  
  
Logan knew he could jump down into the alley and go after them - he had their scents, and in spite of the urban reek of the city, he knew he could track them anywhere they chose to run - and certainly the cops were welcome to take potshots at him; it would sting, but no more than that. But what about Scott? If they shot at him, they'd surely shoot at his "partner in crime", and Scott had no immunity to bullets. Shit!  
  
He retracted his claws, braced for a bullet in the head (again), but the cops just flinched, clearly waiting for their cue from bullhorn. "Are you gonna go after them?" Logan carped. "They got a lead on you dicks! They're heading towards Hell's Kitchen!"  
  
"Get off the truck, now!" Bullhorn roared, making his angry face turn a tomato red. He was about two seconds away from shooting everyone.  
  
But there was the small matter of the chopper, that was flying in a circular pattern, strangely high to avoid the skyscrapers, and to minimize the backwash from the rotors that could hurt people on the street below. It was not the air support the cops wanted - it was a news chopper. The irony was, Reaper's boy and his gal pal ran from the media, not the authorities, and the media were going to keep the cops from shooting them down in cold blood.   
  
"What is wrong with you people?" Scott shouted, his drunk anger resurgent. "We ran those guys off! We are good guys! Can't you get that through your thick heads?!"  
  
Logan closed his eyes and groaned. Insulting jittery cops was never good if you weren't immune to bullets. And he knew he could make it worse for Scott by pointing out he quit the X-Men, but he'd probably best save that for sobriety.  
  
What the fuck was Reaper's guy doing here, in New York, right now? Logan found it hard to believe it was coincidence (even though Reaper was so dead there probably wasn't enough of him left to fill a bucket), but why rob an armored car? It seemed petty somehow.  
  
Logan had made up his mind to just jump off into the alley and hope the media presence was enough to keep Scott from going down in a hail of bullets when he heard a familiar "whoomp", and canisters clattered onto the street, spewing white smoke.  
  
Not smoke - tear gas.  
  
"Who fired those?!" Bullhorn shouted, as three more canisters hit the street, filling it with a nearly impenetrable, noxious white fog.  
  
Logan was immune to it; it offended his nose and stung his eyes, but no more than an exposed septic tank. But from the sudden choking noise coming from across the street, Scott wasn't, and Logan knew (without knowing how - typical), that with this much gas, a normal person could suffocate - unlikely, but possible. Especially in his compromised state.  
  
Logan jumped off the truck, deeper into the swirling clouds of noxious vapors, and found Scott on his knees, gasping for breath. "I can't breathe," he rasped, wasting air on the perfectly obvious.  
  
His own eyes were watering, but only because of the chemical sting; he had no trouble breathing, he just had a bad, burning taste in his throat. He yanked Scott back up to his feet, then pulled his shirt up. Scott almost objected to this, but as soon as Logan covered his nose and mouth with the tail of his shirt, Scott seemed to get he wasn't trying to pants him, and the fabric seemed to instantly cling to the mucus and tears already streaming down his face. "Shallow breaths," he told him, trying his best to see through the gas, putting his arm around Scott's shoulders and holding him up. He was probably going to have to rely on memory, what with this stuff still spewing out and the air heavy and still (save for the rotor backwash, which was probably spreading this misery down the block), but luckily Logan was pretty confident in his own sense of direction. Ironically, this crap could help them elude the cops - which made him wonder anew who has actually fired the canisters, and why. Did Reaper's guy and his girlfriend have a silent partner?  
  
When the wind started to pick up, he thought the helicopter was coming in low, attempting to get a better look. But the air wasn't pressing down on them from above but swirling around them, and belatedly he realized it was scooping up the gas, surrounding them in a funnel of opaque vapor, like they were suddenly safely tucked away in the eye of a hurricane.  
  
Logan's suspicions were confirmed when he saw, walking towards them from the end of a neighboring alley, Storm, her eyes as white as Static's. "I guess it's a good thing I came after you," she said. Tears were starting to run down her face, even from the most minor dose of the gas.  
  
"Why'd you come after me?" He asked. Scott tried to say something, but just coughed thickly, and Logan wondered if he was going to start barfing now.  
  
Storm cocked her head to the side, like it was the stupidest question he could ever ask. "I was afraid you might dump Scott off in the Bronx."  
  
"Would I do that?" He lied, wondering how she knew him so well. What had Jean been telling her about him?  
  
Ororo pointedly did not answer that question, which was probably for the best. "What the hell is going on here? I assume you're both not involved."  
  
At least she had the decency to lie and say "both", but he knew she really only meant it for him. Logan scowled at her. "No. We stumbled into something … no, scratch that - drunk boy here stumbled into something, and I had to extract his ass."  
  
Scott muttered something, "Mff nff fhrunkh," which Logan guessed was, "I'm not drunk." But then he started coughing again, and that put the end to his conversational abilities.  
  
Storm shook her head and scowled in disappointment, but aimed it solely at Scott; she expected better of him. But Logan? Naw, she expected this kind of shit from him, and that made him feel vaguely insulted. "Let's go. We can come back for the car when the incident - and the gas - has blown over."  
  
"Fine with me," he agreed, dragging Scott towards the alley. He was leaning on him so heavily, Logan wondered if he was about to pass out.  
  
Logan wondered - not for the first time - exactly how he got involved with these people, and why he stuck around.  
  
2  
  
By the time they got back to the mansion, a whole bunch of the kids - only about half that he recognized in even the vaguest way - were gathered in the front room, watching the fight they'd just been through on television.  
  
If the professional newshounds got any footage, it wasn't being shown ad nauseum; what was was shaky camcorder footage that mostly just showed off the amount of power that Scott and the Reaper creep were throwing around (he remembered how Bob had made Blaster Boy shoot himself in the face with his own power back in Montana, and had to conceal a snicker), and then, near the end, showed a blur slashing a car in two pieces in mid-air. Guessing from the silver glint, that was him.  
  
The kids seemed thrilled by the footage, and were actually cheering for it. Storm had already dragged Scott in through the underground entry, and he left her to figure out how to give him an eye wash (typical after tear gas exposure) without destroying the sink, and she had left him to explain all of this to Xavier - he really had no idea who had the worst job. Logan was hoping he could sneak by the kids, like last time, but he had no such luck.  
  
Rogue led a round of applause, and Brendan's pretty boyfriend (what was his name again?) asked, "Why don't you teach us this shit in the danger room?"  
  
He just shrugged, and said, "Take it up with Summers."  
  
The kids had the sound turned down low, and he knew why, because it wasn't so low that he couldn't hear it. The pundits on t.v. were ranting about the "mutant problem", about what threats they obviously were to decent, "ordinary" people. One commentator compared Scott to an "android", and Logan - predictably - heard himself referenced as "some kinda animal" again. What about Blaster Boy and the woman who could bench press the Empire State Building? Were they not as photogenic? Or were they too photogenic - so much like "normals", the populace couldn't be scared by the mere concept that a filthy mutant could pass for one of them?  
  
Then one commentator mentioned the "injured" flooding local hospitals, and Logan was willing to bet his left nut the majority of those "injuries" were from exposure to tear gas. The anti-mutant people would just use any excuse to blame them, wouldn't they? Especially when it was not their fault. Okay, it was the fault of some mutants, but not the ones being picked apart in the media for - god forbid - trying to help those stupid, "ordinary" people. He knew he shouldn't, he knew it was wrong, but right now he loathed them all.  
  
He was almost to the elevator when a familiar voice said behind him, "When they bother to view the entire tape, they will know the real story. You have to forgive them their momentary hysteria - it makes for an exciting, if inaccurate, news story."  
  
Logan turned to see Xavier gazing at him placidly from his wheelchair, hands folded in his lap. "Thank you for bringing Scott back in one piece."  
  
He waited for him to add, "And not dropping him in the Bronx," but he didn't. Maybe that was implied. "Does this mean I don't hafta tell you what happens?"  
  
"I have seen the footage," Xavier said, his lips quirked up in a hint of a smile. "You and Scott did very well. You make a good team."  
  
Logan knew he was just saying that to get on his nerves. "No we don't. Is Bob still here?"  
  
A troubled look passed over Xavier's face like a cloud scudding over the sun. "No. He left shortly after telling me of Jean's eminent return. He thought you'd be angry with him for sending him after Scott."  
  
"He was right," he said, rubbing his eyes. They were a little dry, but otherwise okay. Unlike Scott's, which had swelled up underneath his visor, and made it look like the thing had been shot onto his face at a high speed. Also, he wasn't the walking snot factory like Scott was the last time he saw him. Tear gas was a lovely thing.  
  
"You recognized one of them?" Xavier suddenly said, shocked.  
  
He wasn't going to discuss this with him. "Scott doesn't want to be here. I imagine once he's sobered up, and the swelling's gone down, he's not gonna wanna stay. I hope you got your pep talk all ready to go, 'cause I've done all I could."  
  
"You're not staying?" It wasn't really a question.  
  
"I never intended to. I just stopped by to … fuck, I can't even remember anymore." The irony of him forgetting something yet again was not lost on him. "Look, I'll check in, but maybe while there's publicity floating around, it'll be good for me to get away."  
  
"Why do you always believe yourself to be a hindrance?" Xavier asked, refusing to just let him leave. "You've always been a help to us, and I like to think we've been some help to you."  
  
He sighed, wondering why he never thought that Xavier would try and lay a guilt trip on him. "I'm not bein' ungrateful, okay? I just got some things to take care of."  
  
Xavier gave him a knowing smile, tinged with sadness. "You always have things to take care of, Logan."  
  
"I know. I got a shitty life." He considered the news footage, and the windbag commentators calling him an animal, and said, "Well, shittier." He turned and walked away, the psychic weight of Xavier's guilt pressing down on his back, and he said, without bothering to turn around, "Give me a ring if Jean gets back ahead of me."  
  
But even as he said it, Logan knew it was a sick joke. He would probably be the first to know when Jean came back. He just didn't know if Jean or Camaxtli would be the one to make sure of that.  
  
****  
  
He was rather surprised he got out of New York in one piece.  
  
It still bothered him beyond the telling of it that Reaper's man was involved that - it almost felt like a set up - but it didn't make a lot of sense. And Reaper's buddy probably never even saw him, as he had his hands full with Scott the whole time; he probably wasn't even in his peripheral vision. Which made him wonder what he thought when Hulkette told him, and he saw the footage on the tube.  
  
But he didn't think about it much. He let it fall away behind him like so much roadway, the black ribbon of highway his bike ate up so fast he was surprised it wasn't becoming molten beneath the wheels, returning to a liquid state.  
  
When he could go off road he did, leaning into the tunnel of wind threatening to rip him off the motorcycle and throw him aside. And even though he knew damn well it was stupid, even with his healing factor, there was something freeing and exhilarating in just letting go like this, in just trying to outrace everything he had been and was; everything that made up his sad excuse for a life.   
  
Maybe he ran too much, but sometimes there was something simply in the act of running that made you feel alive, in control of your fate, if only until you couldn't run anymore.  
  
Gladly lost in road hypnosis, he didn't realize he was in his target area until he was almost through it, and then he had to slow down, letting the giddy rush drain away in increments, preparing for the awful moment when he would have to stop, and let time and reality catch up with him.  
  
But it was not the worst of all realities, not here. Even as he parked his bike in a gutter scummy with recent rainwater and spilled malt liquor, in front of what looked like some kind of hybrid warehouse/brownstone, he knew this was a good place to be. Slightly shitty neighborhood, but safer than anyone would imagine by looking at it.  
  
Logan let the pack on his back fall to his arm as he went up to the building's door, and buzzed the unit he wanted, casting a glance at the oddly whitish sky overhead, and the more or less empty streets around him. It might have made him nervous if it wasn't typical.  
  
The intercom opened with a crackle, and a loud blast of music - Prodigy? - came through before a man said, "Yeah, what?"  
  
"Gonna let me up or what?"  
  
There was a pause, which allowed him to hear it was indeed Prodigy singing about poison, which meant it must have been Marc's theme song, and then he said, in the worst Southern accent ever affected, "Well, goll - ly, I got me a gul durn tee vee star at my door!"  
  
Logan groaned in disgust. So it had made it down to Baltimore ahead of him, had it? "I am so going to kill you," he grumbled, glancing around once more, just to make sure there was no one loitering with a video camera.  
  
"Killed by a celer-bity! I'll be on Entertainment Tonight for shor!"  
  
"Let me in the fucking door, Marcus, or I will break it down," he growled into the intercom.  
  
Marcus chuckled, deep and low, having so much fun he couldn't even fake a straight face (or voice). "Don't get your panties in a bunch, man." There was a buzz, and the door released. "Get up here 'fore the paparazzi spot you."  
  
"Gee, thanks," he growled, grabbing the door and yanking it so violently open he was surprised he didn't rip it off its hinges. Marc's continued chuckling seemed to follow him through the vestibule.  
  
Once he climbed the metal stairs up to Marc's apartment, he found him waiting for him on the riser, a bottle of lime tea in his hand. "You can't even go to the store without running into shit, can you?" He said, but it was more sympathetic than taunting. Marcus was dressed casually in a white tank top and gray sweatpants, barefoot but still wearing his gold scorpion earring and a necklace that looked like a shark's tooth (and very well could have been), as well as his ubiquitous black goggles.  
  
"Seems that way, doesn't it?" He agreed.  
  
He followed Marc into his apartment, where the blinds were - as usual - closed against the half-light of this cloudy day. As soon as Logan shut the door behind him, Marc used a remote control to turn down his theme song, and Logan asked, "So how was Europe?"  
  
Marc shrugged, and threw himself down on the end of his leather couch, slumping comfortably down in it. "Don't know, I never got any chance to enjoy it. I can give you a critique of their airports, though - and ya know what? The French security personnel really are ruder than the ones you'd find in Detroit. Swear to Bob. So what brings you by? Tagawa told me he was very pleased with your business arrangement."  
  
"Yeah, I know - and that's the reason." Logan sat down on the opposite end of the couch, letting his pack drop to the floor. Marc was kind enough to turn off the t.v. - which, again, had the sound off. Could mutants only watch the news if they turned the sound off?  
  
"Have fun kicking ass?"  
  
"Always. You?"  
  
"Hell yeah. What's in the bag? Did ya bring me a severed head?"  
  
"Almost as good." He handed the bag to Marcus, who had to put his drink down to take it. Marc peered inside curiously, as if expecting something to jump out and bite him.   
  
"Buttload of cash."  
  
"Uh huh."  
  
Marcus tossed the bag back in his lap. "This is yours. Wanna drink?"  
  
"Are you tellin' me you don't want it?"  
  
"I'm tellin' ya it's yours - you earned it. I got my cut. So, wanna beer, hero?"  
  
Logan scowled at him. "Don't call me that."  
  
Marc shrugged as he got up and went over to his fridge. "You did the job, and I got my cut. I'm not a pimp - I ain't gonna take eighty percent."  
  
"But I don't … " Want it, he thought, but that didn't make sense even to himself. " … need it."  
  
He snorted derisively, opening the fridge and fishing out a can of lager. He tossed it at him, and Logan caught it easily, the cold aluminum slick in his hands. "Are you serious? Everybody needs money, man - especially in this shitty economy."  
  
"I know, but you know I travel light. Money's a burden I don't wanna deal with."  
  
"Once again, I am awed by you," Marc said, returning to the couch.   
  
"Is that good or bad?" He wondered, cracking open the lager.  
  
"Basically both. You live without money. You're content to skate along with nothing holding you down … how the fuck do you live without a DVD player?"  
  
He shrugged, and took a big swig of the thick, strong beer. Oh yeah, Marc - like Bob - always had the good stuff. "It's hard to miss shit you can't remember having."  
  
"True enough. So what do ya think?"  
  
"'Bout what?"  
  
"Teaming up? We'd really rake it in on the merc market."  
  
He stared at him in disbelief. "I just said I don't want money."  
  
"But you do like kicking ass. And you'd be able to do whenever you wanted to - none of this random brawling."  
  
He rolled his shoulders and let himself relax back into Marc's couch, sighing and closing his eyes. It was odd how comfortable he felt with Marcus - or maybe not. Marc was a mutant, but not a goody two shoes like those at Xavier's; he was not expected to be on his best behavior here. And, at the end of the day, Marc was not afraid of him, nor did he fear he was some kind of wild animal - he did not treat him like a delicate explosive primed to detonate. Until this moment, he had no idea how much he appreciated that. "I'll think about it," he told him.  
  
"Which means no."  
  
"It means I'll think about it." After a moment, he added, "I think I'm being set up again."  
  
Marcus settled into the sofa before he asked, "By mutants, demons, gods, or all of the above?" 


	3. Part 3

That was actually a good question. He had to think about it a moment. "Mutants, I think. So far, anyways."  
  
"Any in particular?"  
  
"Do you remember the guy we encountered up in Montana, the one who shot concussive blasts from his hands?"  
  
Marc paused, and when Logan opened his eyes and raised his head, he saw him grimacing at an invisible point somewhere near the flat screen television. "Yeah, I remember him, but I can't say I ever got a good look at him."  
  
"Doesn't matter. He and a friend were the ones trying to rob that armored truck today."  
  
Marcus looked at him, eyebrows raised high over his goggles. "No shit. Ain't that a coinky-dink?"  
  
"That's just what I was thinking … except it was actually coincidence I was thinking, not that."  
  
"I suppose it's silly to ask if you caught him."  
  
"Very silly."  
  
"So … you want me to look up this ass clown?"  
  
Logan tried hard not to snicker, but it was difficult. "Ass clown?"  
  
"You saying he ain't an ass clown?"  
  
He coughed, and tried again. "I've never heard it used in a sentence before?"  
  
"What about butt pirate?"  
  
Logan chuckle and shook his head. "You know how immature this is, right?"  
  
"Yeah. What's your point?"  
  
Honestly, he didn't know anymore. He was suddenly wondering if the difference between an ass clown and a butt pirate was the addition of a red foam rubber nose, or the subtraction of an eye patch, and he couldn't help but laugh. Five minutes around Marc, and he was already deranged. Pretty good record, actually.  
  
Marc got up and started off towards his bedroom, probably to grab his laptop. "We owe blaster for Montana anyways, don't we?"  
  
"Yeah, I guess. Although Bob did make him shoot himself in the face."  
  
He chuckled, the sound following him into the bedroom. "Good ol' Bob. It's nice to know there's at least one god with a sense of humor."  
  
"If only he holstered it from time to time."  
  
Marcus came back to the living room, padding lightly on bare feet, the laptop bag slung over his shoulder. "Well, he's Australian, ya know. Well, kinda."  
  
"What's that got to do with anything?"  
  
"From my experience, Aussies ain't big believers in moderation. They do something, they do it up big. Kind of like Americans, but with a tad less militancy."  
  
Logan considered that as Marc sat down and took out the slim computer, taking it out and booting it up. "Yer a man of the world, Marc."  
  
"Don't I know it."  
  
For some reason, that reminded him of his chat with Bob back at the mansion. "Hey, you know all those Organization records you've seen?"  
  
He glanced at him curiously. "Yeah?"  
  
"Have you ever run across the code names Impulse, Ballistic, or Dreamer?"  
  
He frowned in concentration, staring off into space for a moment. "Ballistic sounds kinda familiar," he admitted. "Impulse rings a bell. Big no on Dreamer, though."  
  
Logan nodded, accepting that. If Marc didn't know, he didn't know who else would. Except ... no, he couldn't do that. He didn't even know where to begin.   
  
"Why? Did you remember something?"  
  
"No. Cressida mentioned them, said we were all Alpha mutants, and I'm just trying to piece together the group in my head."  
  
Marc smiled brilliantly. "So you really are an Alpha male, huh?"  
  
Logan gave him an evil look, not ready to admit that was - vaguely - kind of funny. "Didn't need anyone to tell me that, did I?"  
  
He chuckled again, and turned his attention back to the laptop. Marc had apparently made and kept all his accumulated data on the Organization, in a file he had named "System Restore". That made Logan sit forward curiously, setting the beer can aside. "Isn't that a real folder?"  
  
"Yeah, but if anyone searches the hard drive, they ain't gonna look in a systems file - they'll be looking for personal stuff. Like this." He pointed to a little files on the top portion of the screen, named - appropriately enough - "Org".   
  
"What's in there?" Logan knew Marc well enough to know that that couldn't be what it was advertised.  
  
He grinned, flashing him his perfect white teeth. "A real nasty virus. Open that file, and hard drive goes bye bye."  
  
"You've booby trapped your own computer?"  
  
"You can never be too careful."  
  
True enough. "If you'd join the X-Men, I'd never leave."  
  
That made him snicker. "They can't afford me." Marcus started going through what must have been an index of his own devising, searching his own personal database for references to Ballistic, Impulse, and Dreamer. After a minute or so, the hits looked disappointing. "One a piece?" Logan said, wishing he was surprised.  
  
Marc just shrugged his massive shoulders. "Somethin's better than nothin', man." He found the files he was looking for, and Logan watched the columns of data appear on screen. They looked like scanned documents, but not whole ones - fragments of documents, or ones where so much had been blacked out, it was laughable.  
  
But Marc wasn't looking at the slightly corrupted data; he was looking at his own notations about the files. "Found these last year at Villa Nuevo," he reported.  
  
"Mexico?"  
  
He nodded. "The destroyed base. Somebody'd burnt that place to cinders. They shoulda combed the ashes, though - as you can see, I recovered something."  
  
"Not anything useful."  
  
"True. But did you see this?" Marc pointed to a small bit of print near the bottom, and magnified it, although really there was no need; Logan had keen eyesight, after all.  
  
There was Ballistic's name, followed by a blacked out series of words, leading to a couple of words that had been almost blacked out, but not enough to make them illegible - Weapon X.  
  
Logan felt his heart skip a beat, and taste something sour in the back of his throat. "Ballistic's connected to me?"  
  
"I can't really say. As you can see, this document got the royal Nixon screw job. Or maybe I should call it Halliburton now, huh? Anyways, if I can be allowed to guess, the general tone of the document - again, from what I can discern from the use of several "ands", "tos", "the", and three "buts" - is something that failed."  
  
"Like Weapon X failed?"  
  
"You didn't fail, man - you failed to operate to specs. And good for you, those motherfucking bastards. No, my guess here is that Ballistic was like Shrike: considered a good candidate for the living weapon makeover, but a failure in the trial runs."  
  
Logan shrunk back into the couch, grabbing his beer can like a lifeline. He felt sick and angry, and wondered if the mention of "weapon x" would ever make him feel any differently. Perhaps not in this lifetime. "Lucky me - I'm the only one who made it work."  
  
Marc's fingers flew over the keyboard, and the documents disappeared, back into the phony systems restore folder. "Surviving is not exactly "making it work", bud. And besides, it was a good thing you did."  
  
"How so?"  
  
"'Cause you lived to throw it back in their face. Shrike was a punk ass bitch, an insane motherfucker who'd have relished being their lapdog, and I got no faith in some piece of shit named Ballistic. Ignore that spy movie shit - people are easy to break. Everyone can be broken, and without much effort, either. That ain't the thing. The thing - and rare it is - is the ability to come back from it. People who do often come back weak, frail, gun shy. Not you. You come back hard, man."  
  
He glared at him, feeling inexplicably enraged. "I am gun shy. I can't even fucking sleep at night."  
  
"I'm not talking about that, although I'm shit sorry about that, man. I'm talkin' about gettin' your mind back - you coulda - and probably shoulda - been nuts forever. You shoulda remained their trained little monkey even when you got better; after all, how many times did they have telepaths jump in your head and make you over? But it never stuck, and don't give me that "healing factor" shit - it was part of it, but not all of it. You were the engine behind it; something in you hid in the back and refused to stay gone, and beat it back. You are the most perversely stubborn person I've ever met, and that stuff doesn't happen on its own. You learned to be that way; probably the hard way. That's why I want you on my side - no fuckin' way do I ever want you comin' after me."  
  
Something burned in Logan's stomach, but he didn't know if it was embarrassment, rage, a combination of both, or his hunger was finally catching up with him. Maybe he should have had that sandwich. "So you acknowledge I'd beat your ass?" He teased, smiling.  
  
Marc scowled darkly at him. "Only 'cause my venom would only work on you once. And would ripping your heart out kill you?"  
  
He shrugged. "It might. For a while."  
  
"See? You're like an honorary demon or something. No offense."  
  
"None taken. I think."  
  
"I'm not sayin' I'm glad it happened to you, just that … you're not the type that ever goes quietly, that's all. They shoulda known you'd come back to spit in all their faces - the very qualities they coveted in you would be the same ones that could destroy them. But they played the odds, the arrogant cocksuckers."  
  
"They're not all gone yet."  
  
"No, but they will be. Give us time."  
  
It was then the oddest thought struck him. He studied Marcus curiously, the blue glow of the computer screen making his goggles mirrors of light, and suddenly he wondered … did he have … feelings for him?  
  
No - what the hell was he thinking? Just because he batted for both teams - so to speak - didn't mean he loved him or something. It was actually a pretty arrogant thought. Marcus was just a friend, and friendship without a price was always something he couldn't reconcile. "So I assume Japan was good for you," Marc said, continuing to search his files - for what, Logan had no idea. "You don't look like a refugee from a David Cronenberg film anymore."  
  
"Hey! I was never that bad."  
  
He scoffed. "Oh yeah?"  
  
Logan decided to ignore that. "It was good. I … I was hopin' to use the sword for myself, you know."  
  
Marcus looked at him curiously. "How?"  
  
Under scrutiny, he felt ashamed and stupid. He fidgeted uncomfortably, then admitted, "To try and bring back Mariko, and Jean."  
  
He arched a single eyebrow, clearly thinking "Moron" if not saying it. "And what happened?"  
  
"Tagawa turned out to be right - it was all rumor. The sword was powerless."  
  
"You didn't find that out the hard way, did you?"  
  
He wondered what he meant by that, then decided not to ask. "No. Once I recovered it, it was obvious."  
  
"So you gave it back to him, got your money, and everyone is happy? Except for the dead."  
  
"Yeah … except Jean isn't dead. She was transformed by Camaxtli, but Bob told me that later on."  
  
"Ah, of course. Things like that happen." He flashed him a cheesy grin.  
  
"Nobody likes a smart ass, Marc."  
  
"Takes one to know one," he replied, twisting his face into a goofy grimace. He then smirked and looked back at the screen. "Sometimes the world is so fucked I don't even try and understand it. I just roll with the tide and hope I don't drown."  
  
Logan nodded, seeing the wisdom in that. "By the way, can you search your files for a project called Eidolon?"  
  
"Sure." Marc went right back to work, and seemed happy to have a purpose beyond digging up something on Ballistic.  
  
He didn't know why, but he had a sudden, urgent need to spill his guts. Maybe it was having a good beer for a change. "I think … I think I've come to terms with Riko being gone. I mean, I know she's been dead for longer than I can remember, but … she was so real, ya know? I mean, in the few memories I have of her, it was like she was right there. I could smell her, I could hear her voice, I knew how soft her hair felt - " This was getting embarrassing, so he looked away, studying Marc's baker's rack - used as a bookcase - on the far side of the room, right next to the bedroom entrance. There were lots of science fiction books, some magazines, some computer manuals, and … were those comics? Yes, comics. Why not? There was also one of those tiki island heads, with a fake plastic lei around it, and a cigarette butt wedged in its gaping mouth. "She was real to me, ya know? And she … she loved me, I know she did, I could feel it, and … I let her down. She died, and it's my fault. I failed her, I couldn't protect her, and - "  
  
(I can taste her blood in my mouth, he thought, but those words he could never force himself to spit out - nor would he to anyone, not even Marc.)  
  
" - I still can't believe someone like her could love someone like me. It ain't ever happenin' again, I know that, and … like I said, maybe it would've been better if I'd never known, so I wouldn't know what I was missing." He sighed, and felt like an idiot. "I think the tear gas is finally getting to me."  
  
This whole time, Marc had been clicking away on his keyboard, and the sound had been strangely reassuring. But now he stopped, and after a moment, he said, "Why do you buy that Org shit? That yer some kinda animal or monster or somethin'? They'd love you to buy that so they could control you more, make you believe you deserve the crap they throw your way, but it's bullshit. You're a man, a Human being, always have been and always will be, don't ever let anyone tell you different. And I don't claim to know what happened, but I can't believe you let her down. She got killed? What the fuck happened to you? Did you ever think about that? I know you, Logan, and I'd bet all the money in that bag that they went through you to get to her, and by the time you scraped yourself off the floor, it was all over. 'Cept for them. Uh, do you know who killed her?"  
  
"I think so."  
  
"Did you kill them?"  
  
He rubbed his eyes, and helped himself to a hearty swig of beer before answering the question. He actually thought Marc might have had a point - what did happen to him to let them get to Mariko? - but he feared that it might not be that simple; maybe he just fucked up. "Yeah."  
  
"Good," he replied, going back to his keyboard. And Logan knew, from the set of his shoulders, that that was that.  
  
If Marc was a woman, he'd marry him. Seriously. He cooked too, and that was always a plus.  
  
"I've got bupkis on anything named Eidolon," Marc finally told him. "Now I feel like I lost my manhood."  
  
"Have you looked under the couch?" Logan suggested, then sighed in disappointment. "Thanks anyways. Bob's looking into it - maybe he can dig up something."  
  
"Well, if anyone can, it's him." Still, Marc scratched his head, and went back to typing. "Maybe there's a fragment of it in here somewhere - it's a real obscure word." There was a pause before he asked, "So coming to terms with her death and kicking some demon ass got you through your depression?"  
  
He almost hated to disappoint him. "Mostly. I also tried to, uh, kill myself."  
  
That made Marc pause and sit up straight, glancing at him long enough to telegraph a hard glare. "Again? How the fuck do you think you'll able to kill yourself anyhow? Did you go swimming in the hard water of a nuclear reactor? Step in front of an ICBM? Wear Air Jordans and a pointed white hood in Compton?"  
  
"I let a vampire bite me." This almost felt more embarrassing than the whole Mariko admission.  
  
Marc gave him a backhand slap across the shoulder. "Ow," he protested, although it didn't really hurt that much; he pulled it, probably so he didn't break his hand on his adamantium humerus. "Are you completely fucking nuts?! What's the matter with you?!" He scowled at him, looking for all the world like a disapproving father, and asked, "So, are you a vamp or what?"  
  
"No. She didn't drain me dry, she just took a little." Okay, a lot, but same damn difference in the end - he was still here, wasn't he?  
  
"She?" He turned back to the computer, but not before giving him a knowing smirk. "How pretty was she?"  
  
He was going to protest, but why bother? "Gorgeous."  
  
"Ah. So why didn't she finish her Logan shake? You come to your senses and make her go pop?"  
  
"No. It's a long story. But she's really not a bad vampire."  
  
That made him pause, but only briefly. "What, like Angel?"  
  
"No … not exactly. But sort of."  
  
He shook his head. "See what I mean? Fucked up world." He sighed, and sagged back into the couch, folding his hands behind his head. "Well, no fragments of Eidolon either. This is massively fucked up."  
  
"Thanks for trying. Will you take the money now?"  
  
"Gotta do better than that, sucker," he replied, nudging him with his elbow. "You hafta let me know what Bob tells you about all this, okay?" He nodded in agreement. "So what about Jean?"  
  
"What about her?"  
  
"Getting her back from Camaxtli? Is that possible?"  
  
Logan sighed, wishing he didn't have to be the bearer of so much bad news. "If it is, Bob doesn't know about it. He's tryin', I know he is, but I think he's dancing around the main point."  
  
"Which is?"  
  
"He shares Jean's body now, and he's dangerous."  
  
"And a god."  
  
"A very powerful god, who thinks of people as insects."  
  
"Shit," Marc said, in a long sighed. His arms fell loosely to his side, and he let the ghost of Prodigy fill the silence before he said, in a low, somber voice: "Does this mean you guys have to kill her?"  
  
And there it was, the worst thought in the world, one he never wanted to contemplate. He wished somehow he could turn back time just so he never had to hear that question. It brought back all the hard feelings of losing Mariko, failing her, and then when he thought Jean had died … he didn't want to think about this. He wanted to scour his mind and scrub it clean of all these thoughts, all these feelings, the things that made him feel sick and guaranteed he wouldn't sleep at night.   
  
(Where Jean might come back to him - or Camaxtli, wearing Jean's body like a second skin … )  
  
"I don't know," Logan finally admitted. He really didn't know.  
  
He never wanted to know.  
  
3  
  
"Dizzy and clearly unable to just let this go," Bob sang, as he walked the upper corridor of his Sydney home. When he had the home built, he had acoustics in mind, and he swear things sounded much better in here than in the Opera House. "I am surrendering to the gravity and the unknown. Catch me, heal me, lift me back up towards the sun - "  
  
He paused, hand on the door. It looked like any other door in his house, pale ash and stained until its surface was as smooth as glass, but he could feel the minute vibrations through the wood, tremors like the air itself was suffering convulsions, and in a strange way, it was. It was hard to maintain a stable dimensional gateway, nonetheless one that had, as its physical anchor, a home. A plain, ordinary home, with the curious ability to exist simultaneously in several dimensions at once. Much like him, in fact.  
  
Helga and Amaranth knew this door existed, but they had never seen it. He had never let them see it. What was behind this door could never be good for any being that couldn't survive having its consciousness torn apart, chewed up, spit out, and then trampled by several dozen brontosaurus. He couldn't remember the last time he went through this doorway; he didn't even want it in his home.  
  
But it was part of the deal. When he discovered what he was, how to rediscover some of his powers, they let it be known he would have to maintain some indirect connection with them, otherwise they'd just take it all away again - strip him of his memories and his power, throw him in another prison of flesh, let him live as a modern day Cassandra, screaming prophesies to those who would dismiss him harmlessly as nothing but a liar demon or a thief. Poor Cassandra - he felt so much empathy for her. He wondered if she had been one of them too.  
  
He was so glad Helga was out shopping. He didn't even want her within a mile of this place when he went through this door.   
  
" - help me survive the bottom," he sang, then closed his eyes and let himself go.  
  
The power was always like a river of light, pulsing in and through his body, barely contained by something as fragile as flesh and blood and bone. He let it come through his pores, slip between his molecules, sink through and consume his skin like fire. He had thrown open the barrier, and it was all coming through. Without all the protections he had given this hall - this home - his raw power exposure would have vaporized it, as well as the city of Sydney itself, and a good chunk of the harbor. There was a reason he didn't transmogrify to his "natural" state on the physical plane.  
  
And with the last of his physicality gone, shed like old clothes, he merged through the closed door, and into a place he called The Well of Souls.  
  
The name was a lie - it was no well, not as they were traditionally known, nor were there any souls about. As usual, nothing could be that simple. But it did make him feel like Alice jumping down the rabbit hole.  
  
The sensation couldn't be called falling, as gravity didn't exist here; this was a pocket of the High Realms, the place that had kicked him out so long ago, the place that wanted nothing to do with him, and now acted as neglectful parole officers. They never checked in on him, they never tried to hold his powers in check (to his knowledge), but they wanted this tie to him, so here it was.  
  
He had no eyes to see - technically - but he could still see, stretched out before him, his "idealization" of the Realm - in his conception, it was like a chunk of the Great Sandy desert, sand as red as blood, with great chunks of basalt and black rocks like the decayed teeth of a dead giant arrayed around the edges of the near horizon, a natural fence of great menace. He pretended to stand, pretended to feel the wind whipping around him, throwing sand against him at a force that could strip skin from the bone, and waited for them to come. The sky overhead had no sun but was bright anyways, a roiling blue like angry blood.  
  
Although Bob liked to have a form, they loathed to stoop to such things. They felt it was beyond demeaning, like asking the chief financial officer of the company to put on the bunny suit before meeting with the stockholders, only a million times worse. He thought they were morons, who had no idea what they were missing. (And what was wrong with a bunny suit?)  
  
He imagined himself up a pal - a little green gecko that crawled up and had a seat on his hand, and Bob imagined himself sitting down as well, letting the sand swirling around him pile up against him, make a chrysalis of hot earth. He looked down at the bright green gecko and its cute little feet (he loved their feet - a triumph of both form and function), and told it, "Ever wanna meet a god, mate? Well, yer gonna."  
  
But of course he didn't actually speak; he had no verbal skills here, no voice box, and there was no true air to help carry the sounds. Technically he had no eyes either, and the gecko didn't exist either; it was as unreal as his illusory arm. They existed but didn't, in a realm that existed but didn't. This was why no living being could venture in here and expect to ever come out again - not that the Powers would let them. Any lower being stepping in here would be killed, swiftly and - unbeknownst to them - mercifully. They would kill him if they took it upon themselves to kill their own kind.  
  
*You* A disembodied "voice" said, the sound of wind and sand scraping against rock. *Imperfect one. Why do you disturb us?*  
  
That's what they called him -an impersonal "You" or the more personal "Imperfect one". There were no names among what some of the Earthly realm knew as "The Powers That Be", no modifiers of any sort: they were many, and yet thought and operated as a single entity. Perfection was order, and order was perfection - everyone sharing the same thoughts, goals, ideals, and perceptions were orderly, therefore perfect. Groupthink was heaven, at least to them; in Bob's mind, it was hell. This was why he was - and would always be - the Imperfect one. He could not capitulate to the groupmind; he could not subjugate his will to the quest of the perfect order. That's why he was given the "ghastly" punishment of being sentenced to dwell on the realm of grand chaos - the Earthly realm. Capturing him inside a Belial demon body was as close to a sense of irony as they ever came.  
  
*And why do you insist on this setting?* Another voice "said", although it sounded like the first one. But you could feel the difference in the questing mind, in the tone of the thought.   
  
*This is a wasteland* Bob thought in return. *You dwell in a wasteland, you just don't know it.*  
  
There was a pause that was an equivalent of a sigh. *You try our patience, Imperfect one.*  
  
He was speaking to one and all at once; a dichotomy as familiar as it was disturbing. *It's why exist, oh holy salt licks. I need information that only you can give me.*  
  
*If we do not wish to give it, you will not have it.*  
  
He expected that response. If they could admit to having shame, they would be in dire shame over the existence of him - he was living proof that they were not perfect, therefore they'd kill anything that knew he was a Power. God was acceptably vague; Power That Be was fatal. He let the gecko (that didn't exist) crawl up his body, onto his face (which didn't exist); the feeling of its feet on his skin (which both were non-existent) was pleasantly reassuring. *I need to know how to remove a god from an avatar, without hurting an avatar.*  
  
There was a pause that could have stretched out for eternity. Bob imagined the wind howling, the sand forming dust devils that moved across the barren landscape like animals running for their lives, black stone crumbling like desiccated bone. He didn't know if they weren't going to tell him, or if it was simply a question with no known answer. 


	4. Part 4

Finally, they said: *The avatar is irrelevant; the presence of a god would have tainted the avatar.*  
  
*The avatar is not irrelevant. If they can be saved, I want to save them.*  
  
*They cannot be saved. If a god has claimed one, they are claimed.*  
  
If he could have taken a deep breath and counted to ten, he would have. But he couldn't, and maybe that was for the best; he was fucking pissed off. *There has to be something I can do. Are you saying the Powers That Be have no power here?*  
  
There was a bitter taint to the silence that ensued. If they could be said to be angry, they were now. *You try our patience again, Imperfect one.*  
  
*Are you saying the Powers are impotent in the face of a lowly god?* There was a hierarchy to the Higher Realms that even he didn't fully understand. In fact, it was this big, incestuous mess (as far as coherent energy could be incestuous - which was even more confusing), and he knew the heart of most problems was the refusal of the Powers to get involved with anything that had no direct effect on them at the moment.  
  
*We have no interest in what a god chooses to do with its vessel.*  
  
*That is not an answer!* It was impossible to shout without a voice. *Yes or no - give me that.*  
  
*Yes or no what?* Now they were being deliberately annoying. Damn it, why did they have to suddenly show an emotion now?  
  
*You can do nothing to free an avatar from its god? Even if it chooses to take you on?*  
  
There was a long pause, where he let the wind die down, tasting moods of defiance and impatience in the non-existent air. "If it wants to seal its fate, let it come.*  
  
And he knew that was it - all he would get out of them. But no answer was an answer, was it not? They didn't know how to do such a thing - and they couldn't care less. A lone god facing them all wouldn't stand a chance, and even less so if they were dependent on a physical body, so that didn't bother them. They couldn't remove a god from an avatar, because they never had any need to; such a thing was no threat to them at any point. They wouldn't even consider it in a rhetorical sense, because it might help him. Nice. *Thanks for nothing* he thought bitterly, preparing to leave.  
  
*You exist at our whim, Imperfect one,* One of them warned. *Do not seek to try our patience, or you will discover the limit of it.*  
  
*I'll keep that in mind,* he thought in reply, aware that they couldn't even begin to interpret sarcasm.  
  
The door appeared standing free in the middle of the blood red desert, and he let himself merge with it, slip between its atoms, funnel down into the dark heaviness of reality. This was what they meant by burning up in the atmosphere; this is what they meant by hard landing. He felt suddenly leaden and shredded, torn into a billion constituent molecules, then he pulled himself together, made himself recreate himself, the prison of flesh that contained what he was behind chains of blood vessels and bars of bone.  
  
Bob collapsed to the floor of his hallway, naked and doused in sweat, breathing hard with lungs that felt new. Ah fuck, he hated going to that place.  
  
A Perfect Circle was still playing on the downstairs stereo, and judging from the song rotation, he hadn't been gone long at all, in the time of this reality - maybe ten minutes, tops. Strange how it felt like a year.  
  
Trying to ignore the pain that wasn't pain as any physical being could reconcile it, he imagined the gecko in the palm of his hand, and conjured it out of thin air, constructing it from the molecules up. He then let it go, watched it climb up the pale blue wall from his vantage point on the claret color carpet. It took a lot out of him, but sometimes he felt better if he thought his pain had a purpose.  
  
What was the purpose here? There was none. He'd gone to his final source for answers, and came up empty. What the hell was he going to tell Logan?  
  
The tremor in his nerves seemed to steady, calm, and he sat up carefully, singing along with the stereo. Sometimes that helped too; it was a distraction from himself. "Mistook their nods for an approval, just ignore the smoke and smile. Call it aftermath, she's turning blue. Such a lovely color for you … "  
  
He used the wall to help him stand, and took a deep breath, feeling stronger, more physically stable. Getting truly "born again" as an adult hurt like all fuck, which was why he could never take a so called "born again" anyone seriously - if they really had been, they'd be getting very drunk somewhere, and not trying to convert someone to something. Converting didn't kill the pain.  
  
He could have conjured up some clothes, just like he put together the gecko, but he was too fucking tired to be bothered. Besides, the bedroom was just down the hall. But why get dressed when he could sleep for a year? "Wanna get my calls for now?" He said to the gecko, as he started down the hall, leaning heavily against the wall. As if the Powers weren't unpleasant enough on their own, the transmogrifying across dimensional planes was a killer - figuratively and somewhat literally.  
  
"I just didn't want to know," he sang as much as sighed. There had to be something; there had to be something he was overlooking. Could it end like this? Would he have to make sure Jean could never come back to this plane to prevent Camaxtli from unleashing hell on earth? And how did he do that without …  
  
Oh shit. He hated these no win situations. He especially hated them when he couldn't figure out a way to at least make them stalemates.  
  
Damn Cammy - damn that scheming motherfucker. He wasn't going to get away with this; Bob didn't care what kind of deal he had to make. He had survived a British prison ship, starvation, the Powers, the Old Ones, Fenrir, Kumiho, and several ex-wives - he was not caving in now.  
  
Camaxtli wasn't going to win.  
  
4  
  
Even though he drove all night, Logan didn't really know where he was going until he crossed the border. Then he knew, and he only briefly wondered why.  
  
He managed to reach Vancouver, but barely in time; the sun was starting to come up, the sky lightening from midnight blue to a moody purple, the sun a scar of blood red on the horizon that was slowly starting to swell and grow, like an injury to the sky. He could even smell that it was going to be a bright day - they had a certain scent, as did cloudy days, gloomy days, ones promising storms, snow, or rain. That was why he pitied people who had to rely on weather forecasts; everyone knew it was an inexact science. But his nose never lied.  
  
But where did he think he was going? He didn't know where she was! Still, he knew she'd be near the docks somewhere - she liked the water - but there was more than one dock in Vancouver. Still, he started at one of the nicer ones, figuring she'd want to upscale a bit, and decided to work his way down, until he got lucky or the sun came up - whichever came first.   
  
As it was, his instincts were eerily accurate. He'd been walking the docks for maybe five minutes when he caught her scent, mingled among sea salt and rotting wood, untreated sewage and exhaust. He hadn't been the only one scenting the air, either, as only two minutes passed before a dark figure jumped down from the roof of a closed nightclub. She landed a meter from him, as graceful as a cat.  
  
"Hey there, little red riding hood," Yasha said teasingly, giving him a smile that was partially predatory, and partially amused. "What have you got for me?"  
  
He raised an eyebrow, unable to keep from smiling. "What d'ya think?"  
  
She grinned. "You're just a little tart, aren't you?"  
  
"Little?" He replied in mock offense. As she winked at him, he asked, "Shouldn't you be gettin' in? It's almost dawn."  
  
"I was just about to head back."  
  
"Gotta place already?"  
  
"Sure do. We vampires might be ageless, but we know that it's sometimes in our best interest to move as fast as possible." She took his hand, her skin the exact temperature of the air around them. "Wanna see it? I have to warn you, I haven't decorated yet."  
  
"Decorating's overrated," he said, wondering if she felt that jolt when she touched his skin. Yes, she did - he could see it in her eyes, scent the pheromones in the air (even vampires gave them off), and he wondered if this was what was meant by being in the "thrall" of a vampire. Because he wanted her so badly he could hardly think of anything else.  
  
"Yeah," she agreed, giving him a look that could qualify as smoldering. She brushed her cool lips against his, and he expected her to kiss him, but she didn't. "I didn't expect you to come back so soon. I'm glad you did," she whispered.  
  
"So am I," he agreed. He had wondered why he raced here, wasted all night and all that velocity to just get here, but now he understood why. Lust was a very powerful motivator.  
  
As luck would have it, she lived close by, and it wasn't a long walk. She had an apartment on the third floor of a near by, slightly sad looking Victorian looking apartment house, that had probably - judging from the narrow red carpeted hallways and the number of doors that had clearly been plastered and painted over - once been a hotel, or maybe even a rooming house. It wasn't wildly populated either; on the first floor, he smelled more cats than people. Well, what was a Victorian style building without a crazy cat lady?  
  
Her apartment on the third floor took up most of it, making him wonder how much she paid for it, but it was amazing how little he actually cared right now.  
  
As soon as they were inside her apartment, he grabbed her and kissed her, like he'd been longing to do since the alley, and she wrapped herself around him like a second skin. She kicked the door shut, but he barely noticed; they were done with the flirting.  
  
They kissed with a violent sort of passion, as if they had been separated for years, and tore at each other's clothes, creating a trail of shreds from the stark living room to the slightly less stark bedroom. But he didn't notice that at the time.  
  
Later - much later - he would notice the windows - that normally had a great view of the harbor - were covered by heavy blue velvet drapes that blocked out every sliver of sunlight. The bedroom was also mostly empty, save for the bed, an old black velvet armchair in the corner, and a poster print of Rene Magritte's "Le Domaine d'Arnheim", which showed a bird's nest (with two eggs) on a stone railing in the foreground, and a sweeping mountainside in the background. Only if you paused to look at it would you realize that the top of the mountain was shaped like a bird's head, and the slopes spread out like wings. He thought perhaps the curtains, chair, and poster came with the place, but it seemed highly unlikely a poster of that Magritte work (hardly his best known) would just appear in an apartment in Vancouver that Yasha just happened to pick. Especially this particular one, featuring a mountainside transforming into a large bird … why did that image bother him so much? After a while, he remembered that Jean - in one of her inhuman forms in his dreams - appeared as a kind of bird (on fire, but still ..). It left him wondering if that was supposed to mean something.  
  
Not that he thought about it much. Maybe he was in Yasha's thrall - he loved the taste of her skin (even if it did tend to be cooler than normal), the solidity of her muscles, the sleek softness of her hair, the smell of her - but if he was, he didn't care. He couldn't remember the last time he felt so good in his own skin, the last time he could almost taste the chemistry between him and another woman, the last time - ironically - he felt this much alive.  
  
Great - he was physically compatible with a vampire. He didn't even want to know what that said about him.  
  
It was nice to sleep without nightmares, but something made Logan jolt awake. It was a … feeling? As soon as his eyes shot open and he found himself staring at the restored plaster ceiling, where the tiniest filaments of sunlight clung to the ceiling like bioluminescent moss, he forgot what had startled him. It was … not a memory, or a nightmare, it was a … feeling, like … someone was watching …  
  
(They weren't alone.)  
  
… but as soon as he was awake, he didn't sense it anymore. What the hell was that?  
  
"What's wrong?" Yasha muttered, turning over and giving him a sleepy look that was tempered by a sharpness deep within her dark eyes. She was ready to go into action if need be, and, being a vampire, that was always impressive.   
  
"I don't know," he admitted, feeling like an idiot. Had his luck finally run out? Was he now having nightmares even after sex? Oh, goddamn it. He shifted slightly, trying to give her a bit more room. She had a big bed - a comfortable one too (nice to know she had her priorities in order) - but he had reflexively wrapped himself around her, trying to keep her warm. Hilarious, as she would not only never get warm (unless she fed), but she hardly noticed temperatures either way. You could freeze a vamp solid, but you couldn't freeze them to death.   
  
But even as he slid aside, she still kept a friendly grip on his arm, resting her cheek against his shoulder. "You usually just jolt awake like someone's putting ten thousand volts through you?"  
  
Well, he supposed he had to tell her sooner or later. "Actually, yeah. In fact … if I ever have a nightmare, don't wake me up."  
  
She looked up at him quizzically. "Why not?"  
  
"I - I get disoriented, and sometimes I - I just react, okay? I think I'm still stuck in my nightmare for a minute. I mean, yer a vampire, so I probably ain't gonna kill you, but my claws could still hurt, so - "  
  
"They're not just nightmares, are they?" She interrupted, genuinely curious. "I mean, there's some things about you that don't add up."  
  
He didn't really like the sound of that. "What do you mean?"  
  
"I mean for a macho stud boy, you seem to carry around a lot of doom and gloom. And don't forget, I constantly saw you falling asleep and waking up like someone just jammed a cattle prod up your ass. So that meant you either had a guilty conscience - possible, but somewhat unlikely - or you keep reliving something awful, something that makes you want to avoid going to sleep at any cost. Or you're tormented by some kind of curse … "  
  
"Yeah, that. I pissed off … a warty demon something."  
  
She scowled at him. "Uh huh. And what are you tormented with?"  
  
"Images of it in a bikini."  
  
She sighed and shook her head, looking away so he didn't see her smile. "Logan, come on."  
  
He rubbed his eyes, buying himself some time, and wondered what was the best way to put it. "The metal in me … some people put it there. They didn't - or couldn't - anesthetize me. And they may have conducted medical experiments on me involving bone saws and steel clamps that peeled the muscle right off my bones."  
  
He felt her cool hand resting on his solar plexus, and it was oddly reassuring. "Let me guess this was against your will?"  
  
"Good guess."  
  
"Who were these people?"  
  
"A group called the Organization. Paramilitary mutant hating motherfuckers."  
  
"They all dead yet?"  
  
"Not yet. Me and a friend are working on it."  
  
"Let me know if I can help. Sounds like those guys forfeited their humanity - maybe it's time they came back to their demon brothers."  
  
She had a point. But they used demons too, although not as much; much of the time, demons were even harder for them to manipulate. Still, what a nice thought, attacking them with vampires and Ressiks. They knew demons, but they rarely seemed prepared for them. Had they ever met a Berserker? The thought of a couple of those oversized lizard kings running through a base almost made him smile. "Why would you help?" He asked, mostly just curious. She had her reasons when they after the sword; there was no reason here.  
  
Her dark eyes were almost luminous, in spite of the gloom. "They hurt you, they hurt me. You're in my blood."  
  
He knew she didn't mean that literally, but it was still a little startling to hear. "Why me? I mean … " He trailed off, aware that saying she must have "eaten a thousand guys" could be taken in a way that he not only didn't intend, but could get him tossed out a window.  
  
But she knew what he meant. She buried her face in his chest, and her hair tickled his skin. "I don't know," she said honestly. She started to kiss him, brushing her lips and teeth across his chest, her hair trailing across his skin like silk. She slid on top of him, her cool skin soft and smooth, and he had to ask, "You ever give up?" Not that he was complaining - oh hell no. Just her scent was enough to stimulate his desire.  
  
"No."  
  
"I'm just Human, you know."  
  
"You heal."  
  
She had him there. He pulled her up to him and kissed her cold lips, feeling like he was breathing for both of them. The violent lust of earlier had given way to a more languid passion, no less intense, just less urgent. After all, they literally had all day - she couldn't go anywhere until dark, and thanks to her, the only intact piece of clothing he had was his jeans (and those were slightly iffy). So it looked like they were stuck here for several hours. What on earth would they do?  
  
Sometimes, life was really good.  
  
5  
  
He already knew you couldn't technically barf yourself inside out, but you could certainly feel like it sometimes.  
  
On top of that, his head felt like it was hosting an alien parasite that was on the verge of bursting out of his skull any second now. Luckily, Jean's lab had lots of medications, and many of them worked quickly - it was just a question of getting down there intact, and then keeping the meds down long enough to let them work.   
  
Scott felt like an idiot as he struggled down to the lower levels, trying not to dry heave in the elevator, and hoped that he didn't run into anyone. But the odds were luckily against that, as it was much later in the day than he thought.  
  
How embarrassing. Worst of all, he could barely remember what the papers were talking about, the thing about the truck and the "mutant attack" downtown in the City. But even more horrifying was the fact that he had been "outed" - he was "tentatively identified" as Scott Summers, a "teacher" (they even threw in the quotation marks - what was that supposed to mean?) at a private school in Westchester. How the fuck did they get that kind of information? Logan - lucky him - was still referred to as "an unidentified companion", and that was probably the best for all concerned, considering Logan's shady reputation, and the type of people that generally seemed to be after him.  
  
Maybe the weirdest thing was Logan was actually looking after him during and after that fight. Weird. Maybe the idea that they were all on the same side was finally sinking through that thick, metal plated skull of his. But of course, maybe not, as he had taken off again. But maybe the Professor was right; maybe Logan had to take this in stages. It was difficult to think of Logan as a victim of something he didn't deserve, but Xavier was of the opinion that fully gaining Logan's trust would take years; he was simply accustomed to getting used, and it was his default position to never give that much of himself away, especially to what he perceived as a "group". Scott couldn't help but point out that he seemed to trust Bob pretty quick, but the Professor told him -and rightfully so - that Bob was a single entity, and besides, he had to trust him -he had no choice. None of them did. That was truly frightening.  
  
Although his stomach lurched once the elevator seemed to settle, he managed to swallow back the bile, disgusted by the sour taste in his own throat, and staggered down the metal lined hall, wincing at how the light seemed to cut through his eyes like shards of broken glass. He made it to Jean's lab, only doubling over once, and once inside the cool steel room, he started looking through the medical cabinet, glad that Jean had a "color coding" system so medical novices like himself and Storm could help her out if need be. Jean. His stomach lurched again, but this time it had nothing to do with his hangover.  
  
She wasn't dead, she was alive - he should have been thrilled. So why wasn't he?  
  
Trepidation, elation, guilt, and anger all swirled together in ways he couldn't even begin to comprehend. He wanted her back, he wanted to apologize, he wanted to hold her again … but what was she now? Camaxtli had her; if kidnapping her wasn't bad enough, he had - according to Bob - "transformed" her. But into what? Bob claimed he didn't know, but Scott suspected he was holding back. Didn't he always? (And Rogue was right - hadn't Camaxtli been a she last time?)  
  
And now, according to Ororo, Bob said jean was "coming back" - then when was still up in the air, but as soon as possible. The Professor seemed to think that was a great thing, as did Ororo - but she told him that Bob didn't appear to feel that way. Scott hated to be on the same side as Bob, ever, but … what if it wasn't really their Jean? What if it was … something else?  
  
He didn't want to think about this now. His head throbbed like an infected wound, and his stomach burned like it was digesting itself. Scott found some anti-nausea medication and some heavy duty migraine meds, and took both of them with the smallest drinks of water possible, trying not to set off his gag reflex. He then laid down on one of the cold metal examining tables and waited for the medications to take effect.   
  
He felt like a moron, and he felt like he and betrayed Jean by not being thrilled by her return … and yet he knew, the instant he laid eyes on her, all of his doubts and fears would disappear. He knew that. And yet … what? What was wrong with him?  
  
He was falling to pieces, that's what. He'd call it a midlife crisis, only he assumed he was going to live past sixty. (Although, at this rate, no fucking way.)   
  
For what seemed like an eternity in this sterile lab, he listened to nothing but his own pounding heart, and finally he could feel the meds starting to work, his stomach settling down and the ache in his head starting to subside. His heart was beating too fast, and even laying down he felt dizzy; to add to the misery, his stomach grumbled, reminding him it was completely empty. He felt like reminding it it was so empty because it had ejected all its contents (and violently at that), but he bet his stomach was in no mood to listen; it had been a pain in the ass all day.  
  
As soon as he thought he could stand, he did, although the room to seemed to swing for a minute. He could almost hear Jean in his head - "Too many medications on an empty stomach. Usually that's not good, Scott." But sometimes, what else could you do?  
  
(Well, not drink two bottles of wine, that's what, but that was hindsight.)  
  
He made his way back up to the mansion proper, now feeling as light and hollow as an empty paper bag, but at least the sunlight streaming through the windows didn't seem physically painful anymore - always a plus.  
  
It was a "free" afternoon, so many of the kids were out, and he'd been hoping he still wouldn't run into anyone, but of course he'd been too lucky for too long - his luck finally ran out.  
  
Piotr was in the kitchen, sitting at the table beside the window and eating a bowl of cereal (in the afternoon?), and he looked up as he came in. "Are you all right?" He asked, pale eyes narrowing curiously. "You don't look good." Sitting in the wash of the sun, he looked as pale as a ghost.  
  
"Flu," he lied, opening the fridge and hiding his head inside it. Scott hoped he didn't ask about what happened yesterday.  
  
He spied and rejected some orange juice (too acidic), and settled on a bottle of mineral water when he heard the mellifluous voice of the Professor suddenly say, "I'm glad you're up and about."  
  
Oh god. Steeling himself, he turned around and flashed a smile that he hoped wasn't as pained as it felt. "I'm starting to feel better, thanks."  
  
The Professor's steely blue eyes settled on his, and he heard, inside his head: *Your reaction was perfectly normal; there's no reason to feel ashamed about it.*  
  
"Professor," Piotr said politely.  
  
Scott sighed, and started searching the cupboards for anything he could stand to eat, not letting on to Piotr that there was a conversation going on that he was completely missing. *I still don't think I can do this anymore, Professor. Okay? I need … I need time.*  
  
*I understand. But - *  
  
"Well, everyone's here," Ororo said, coming into the kitchen and seemingly interrupting the Professor's stream of thought. "I guess mail call does that to people." She place a large stack of recently delivered mail on the end of the table, opposite Piotr, and he sat forward with obvious curiosity.   
  
"Was there anything for me?" Piotr wondered.  
  
Ororo pretended to glance casually through the stack, and then pulled out an envelope covered with colorful overseas stamps. "Just this," she replied, handing it to him and smiling.  
  
Piotr grinned broadly, and anxiously took the letter, ripping into it immediately. His family was in Russia, and the communications from them was sparse; not because of some Iron Curtain embargo, just because mail took so long to get from one side of the world to another. And ever since deregulation and Russia's financial collapse, the phone service there had been iffy at best. Internet was the best way to go, but Piotr's family didn't have a computer, nor did they apparently want one. To say they were old fashioned types was apparently an understatement; according to Pete, his father still mourned the lost of socialism.  
  
Scott caught Ororo staring at him curiously out of the corner of his eye, and when he turned to face her, she crossed her arms over her chest, and gave him a look that Jean might have given him, had she been here. "Shouldn't you still be in bed? You were pretty … bad yesterday."  
  
He got that - pretty drunk. "I'm sorry. I … thanks for coming after me."  
  
She shrugged nonchalantly. "You should thank Logan, not me - I just showed up in time for some clean up work."  
  
It was Scott's turn to shrug, feeling even more uncomfortable than usual. "I would, but it seems he's taken off again. Anyone have any idea where he went?"  
  
Storm shook her head, but the Professor said, "When I last talked to him, I got the impression he was off to see Scorpion." Scott knew that by "impression", he meant he had picked that up from Logan's surface thoughts; it wasn't anything he said to him.  
  
"The guy with the guns?" Piotr said, looking up from his letter. He had laid what looked like polaroids aside, face down. Scott knew that Marcus had saved the Professor - and Piotr - after an attack from some crazed demons, but he had no idea what kind of interaction Piotr and Marcus had. But Piotr seemed to suggest something by mock shuddering. "He's scary. No offense to him, he seems okay, but … damn.  
  
He seems pretty hardcore."  
  
Scott was surprised that Piotr could be off put by anyone. As if being naturally built like a weightlifter wasn't enough, he had that whole turning steel thing going for him. "He's a bit … much," Ororo said, obviously opting for tact. Had she met him? But she tapped a box on top of the mail pile, and said, "Maybe this will bring Logan back pretty soon. Everybody loves mail."  
  
"What?" For some reason, that set off internal alarm bells. Creeping closer, he saw the package - about the size of a small hat box, wrapped expertly in brown paper - was address simply "Logan c/o The Xavier Institute, Westchester, New York". There was no return address, and nothing to suggest who it had come from. Even the postmarks looked anonymous.   
  
"Scott?" Ororo asked, sounding very concerned. "Is something wrong?"  
  
"I think we need to evacuate the school, now," he told, the burning returning to his stomach.  
  
"What?" She replied in disbelief.  
  
"Scott - " the Professor began.  
  
"No one would send Logan anything here," he pointed out, wondering if he should just shoot the bloody thing. But if it was a bomb, he could set it off. "No one knows he's here except … well, you know who."  
  
Pitor stood up so fast his chair screamed on the hardwood floor as it was shoved back violently. "Do you think it's a bomb?" He asked, inadvertently echoing his thoughts.  
  
"I don't know," Scott admitted. "I just have a really bad feeling about this." Did he ever.  
  
Well, he had to look on the bright side - it was hard to feel sorry for yourself when there was a weapon of mass destruction on your kitchen table. 


	5. Part 5

"Scott, you're jumping to conclusions," Xavier said calmly. "Just because it's a package for Logan doesn't automatically make it suspect."  
  
"Yes it does. No one knows he stays here from time to time except the terminally suspect."  
  
Xavier raised an eyebrow at him, remaining strangely calm. "Except for his ex-girlfriend in England, and Bob, and Helga. And Angel, and Scorpion, and that policewoman he knows in Alaska … was her name Alex?"  
  
"But they would know better than to send a package anonymously, don't you think?" Scott briefly wondered about the ex-girlfriend in England - since when had Logan mentioned that? Did Logan know the Professor knew that?  
  
"Maybe they thought he could smell them," Ororo offered, instantly grimacing at how lame and weird that sounded. "You how good he is at that."  
  
"We don't have an x-ray machine or something?" Piotr asked, still eying the box like it might jump up and attack them. "A student who can see in x-rays?"  
  
Xavier shook his head. "Not at the moment, no."  
  
"Then why don't I take it out back and open it?" Piotr suggested. As they all stared at him, he said, "I'll armor up. If there's something explosive in there, it won't hurt me."  
  
"It might not be explosive," Scott pointed out. "It could be toxic."  
  
Ororo scoffed. "Not if they wanted to hurt Logan. He's immune to most of those sort of things. The tear gas didn't even effect him yesterday."  
  
"May I point out once again this could be much ado over nothing," Xavier said, but now he was frowning at the box, as if trying to telepathically scan it.   
  
"But what if it's not?" Scott argued. "We can't just assume this is benign."  
  
"But what if it is?" Storm asked, coming down on the Professor's side. "We'd be invading his privacy."  
  
"I won't look through it," Piotr offered. "I'll just open it to make sure it doesn't detonate." He seemed strangely resigned to it now, as if it was a dirty job someone had to do.  
  
Scott knew the Professor was wavering, so he gave one last ditch effort to convince him. "Even the papers can't identify Logan, and you know why? Because officially he doesn't exist, and has never existed. With a few exceptions, the people who know who he is are not people looking out for his best interests."  
  
Xavier scowled at him and the package alike, as if trying to decide which one was worse. Storm's expression was inscrutable, and Piotr was just waiting for the verdict. "Take it to the auxiliary hangar downstairs," Xavier finally said. "No area is more secure than that."  
  
Scott let out a breath he didn't realize he was holding.   
  
"Are you sure you want to do this, Piotr?" Xavier asked him.  
  
Piotr nodded, his eyes remarkably guileless. "Logan would do the same thing for me."  
  
That made Scott look at him curiously. Had they met? "He would?"  
  
Piotr must have heard the doubt in his voice, because he raised an eyebrow at him, his look verging on skeptical. "Of course he would. He's fearless."  
  
Piotr must never have heard his screaming nightmares. But still, he supposed that otherwise, Piotr had a point - Logan was suicidal self-destructive. If he had any regard for his own physical well being, he generally left it at home - wherever the hell home was. As a team member it made him equally invaluable and completely irresponsible; as good as he was bad. He seriously hoped Piotr wasn't one of those who looked up to Logan while completely missing what exactly it was they were looking up to. Although it was a fine line, there was a difference between bravery and recklessness.  
  
The Professor maneuvered his wheelchair out of the kitchen, and Storm followed him, giving the package an odd backward glance. Scott stood aside as Piotr "armored up" and yet very gingerly picked up the package. It was always an odd thing to see the metal just appear on his skin, flowing upwards like a reverse image of quicksilver being poured on him, but Piotr himself seemed barely conscious of it. As he said, when he "went steel", the only change was he no longer felt anything - heat, cold, any tactile sensations at all. They were all buried under the metal. Sometimes thought Scott that was a pretty good idea, and something he could use.  
  
He followed behind Piotr, taking up the end of their little doom parade, playing rear guard of an unknown threat. It was possible that he was overreacting, and this was some kind of care package from someone … but he still didn't know who would do such a thing. Bob wouldn't bother with something as pedestrian as a package; Scorpion was unlikely to have baked him a bunch of cookies. And frankly, an ex-girlfriend was a likely candidate to send him a bomb, wasn't she?  
  
The auxiliary hangar was just like the main one, layered in thick titanium alloy steel, capable of sealing up tight to contain a fire or an explosion, on the off chance something catastrophic occurred. It hadn't yet, and hopefully never would, but it was good to be prepared. Currently it was empty, save for a tool chest in the far corner, the same silver as the walls so it blended in like an optical illusion. Piotr went inside on his own, while they retreated to a "control room", whose impact proof glass was usually shielded with titanium shutters. But as soon as they entered, Xavier moved to the control panel and they rose up, revealing the stark, brightly lit hangar. Inside of it, the large Piotr looked strangely small and vulnerable, even swathed in steel. Scott wished he was in there with him.  
  
He placed the box down in the center of the hangar, as carefully as if it was made of spun glass, and crouched down beside it, looking towards them. "Are you ready?" He asked.  
  
"Whenever you are," Xavier said aloud, but Scott knew that it had been telepathic as well, otherwise how could Piotr have heard it?  
  
Piotr nodded and very carefully started to peel the tape from the package. Scott felt himself tensing, but he managed not to hold his breath this time.  
  
At least Pete seemed to flinch away slightly as he tore open the flaps of the box, but it was an anti-climax, as absolutely nothing happened.   
  
He scowled as if disappointed, and glanced inside the box. "It's … " he then peered in curiously, as if he wasn't sure what he was seeing. "Is this a joke?"  
  
Scott's bad feeling came back hard. He leaned past Ororo and stabbed the intercom. "What is it?"  
  
She leaned past him and said, "Leave it, Piotr."  
  
But Piotr had already lifted something up, for a better look, and suddenly Xavier gasped. "Oh my god."  
  
He must have seen through Piotr's eyes, because Piotr suddenly dropped the box and lurched backwards, almost tripping himself up in his haste to get away. "What is it?" Storm asked, but as soon as Scott saw Piotr trying to suppress a gag, he raced out of the control room and headed for the hangar door. Perversely, if it was a virus or a toxin, he felt it was only right he be exposed to it, since he put Piotr up to this.  
  
But as he entered the hangar, he heard Xavier say in his head :*It's not what you think.*  
  
He'd entered through the south door of the hangar, so he was closer to the box than Piotr, who was currently leaning against a wall just left of the control room window, head hanging down as if he thought he might barf, or was trying very hard not to. In his haste to get away, Piotr had knocked over the box, and its contents had partially spilled out. Scott approached it cautiously, not sure what he was looking at at first. He thought "something furry", but that made no sense.   
  
He had to stare at a moment to realize what he was seeing, and the sudden, heavy smell of rotting celery - where the hell had that come from? - nearly knocked him flat. But soon he realized he was staring at a head.  
  
He thought Piotr was right, and it was a sick joke. It looked like a mannequin head, and the eyes … the eyes had been replaced by something like yellow glass. Almost the same mustardy color that coated the inside of the box. But there was something in the slackness of the mouth, the discoloration of the skin … it was a real head, wasn't it?   
  
And just beside its ear was a single slip of paper. 'You're next' was written on it in the slowly darkening yellow blood of the demonic victim.  
  
6  
  
Logan didn't even know Yasha had a phone installed until its piercing ring shattered his sleep.  
  
He woke up, only to find Yasha stirring, groaning in complaint. "Fuck," she muttered. "Is it night yet?"  
  
He glanced up at the ceiling, saw that the finger of light on the ceiling hadn't changed much. "Nope."  
  
"Fuck."  
  
"It's your phone." He then paused. "Why do you have a phone?"  
  
"People need to get in touch with me, don't they? Being a vampire doesn't make you a crazed loner. Necessarily. Besides, how else would I get on the internet?"  
  
He rolled his eyes, hoping she was joking, but pretty sure she wasn't. "Everybody is high tech but me, is that it?"  
  
She turned over to face him, and gave him a nudge in the ribs. "It's hardly high tech nowadays, old man - get with the times. And besides, it's a great place to find victims."  
  
He glared up at her, and she gave him a sharp, sarcastic little grin. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were tired, but damn if she wasn't still gorgeous. "You through being funny?"  
  
She pretended to think about it. "Perhaps."  
  
The phone was closing in on its twentieth ring. "Are you gonna get it?" He wondered.  
  
She sighed - amazing since she didn't need to breathe - and flopped back down on her pillow. "Why should I? Unless it's a wrong number or a telemarketer, it's not for me. No one has my number yet. It's probably for you - you get it."  
  
He scoffed. "Fer me? Even I didn't know I was comin' here. How could … " But he trailed off as he realized, holy shit, he did know someone with a knack for finding him. Bob and Xavier alike - but would Bob phone? Well, he could - you couldn't put much past Bob. "Shit," he grumbled, dry washing his face.  
  
"I'm right, aren't I? Wow. Does being an avatar mean you're on a short leash?"  
  
"Ha." He slipped out of bed, more tired than he would have thought, and stalked naked to the phone, his indignant rage growing with ever step. Could he not get a moment's peace? Was a day in bed with his vampire girlfriend too much to ask?  
  
Okay - there was so much about that statement that sounded wrong it almost tripped him up.  
  
The apartment really wasn't that big; he had to walk to the opposite end of it, which ended in a small kitchenette, where old fashioned white paper blinds were pulled down against the slivers of light that could theoretically bleed in through a small side window. The telephone sitting on the counter was the only sign of habitation in the room.  
  
After considering not answering - and then remembering it was well into its thirtieth ring - he snatched the receiver up violently, and snapped, "This better be good."  
  
"I wouldn't bother you if I didn't think it was important," Xavier's smooth, clipped voice replied.  
  
Oh shit. He'd have preferred Bob somehow. If Xavier found him using his Cerebro doohickey, did he know what he was doing? Oh Christ, he hoped not. "What is it?" He said through gritted teeth, not sure if he should be angry, embarrassed, or both.  
  
"I believe you may be in immediate danger."  
  
"I'm always in danger."  
  
"But I believe this threat might be … unusual. We just received a package for you here at the mansion. Scott was concerned it was a bomb."  
  
He just grunted an acknowledgement, not sure what Xavier wanted him to say. "Probably was. No one'd send me somethin'."  
  
"Well … it wasn't a bomb. Piotr opened it, just to make sure it wasn't, and …" Xavier paused, and then asked, "Do you know any demons with yellow blood, and yellow glass in place of eyes?"  
  
The yellow blood momentarily threw him, but the eyes brought him back. "Yellow glass? Do ya mean like yellow crystal?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Yeah, kinda, a Persaid demon. Why?" Had Rags paid a return visit to the mansion?  
  
Xavier's pause was so lengthy Logan could feel the discomfort coming down the line. "His head was inside the box."  
  
Until this point, he had been leaning against the butcher block counter. Now he straightened up. "What?"  
  
He heard Yasha padding in behind him, the sheet wrapped around her like a dark purple sari. "What about a Persaid demon?" She asked quietly.  
  
"It occurred to me calling the police and reporting a demon murder was probably out of their jurisdiction," Xavier added wryly. But that was his only attempt to lighten the news. "There was a note in the box as well."  
  
"What did it say?"  
  
"You're next."  
  
He waited, but obviously Xavier was done. "That's it? No name or anything?"  
  
"No."  
  
Yasha planted herself firmly in his peripheral vision, and asked, "What about a Persaid demon?"  
  
He stared at her impatiently, and was about to ask why she cared - did she know Rags? - but then he suddenly remembered: Cujo. Holy shit. "What color was the guy's hair?" Logan asked.  
  
"Pardon?"  
  
"The guy in the box. Was he blond?"  
  
"No, he had black hair. You know more than one?"  
  
Logan covered the receiver with his hand and held it aside. "Shit, Yasha, I'm sorry. Someone just mailed Cujo's head to me back at the mansion in New York."  
  
Her expression remained as cool as always. "Who would do that?"  
  
He shrugged, not sure what to tell her, but then something seemed to enter her eyes, a sort of startled awareness. "The Vantha," she said.  
  
It took him a moment to remember what she was talking about. "The demon mob Fujimori worked for?" He was about to ask her why they'd bother to do that, but then he realized he still had Xavier on the line. He brought the receiver back up, and asked, "Did the package have any Japanese postmarks?"  
  
"No. There were virtually no markings on it at all."  
  
"You're assuming it really came via the post office," Yasha told him.   
  
Aw crap. "Got the place locked down?" He asked Xavier, never taking his eyes from her intense gaze.  
  
"Yes, but I doubt we're in danger. The head gives every sign of being … recent. They must have known your were here before. They probably will know soon - if not immediately - that you are no longer here. Which is why I thought I'd best warn you."  
  
"Yeah, thanks."  
  
"If you'd like to come back - "  
  
"No, no, I'll be good. Worry about the others; I'll be fine. Thanks." He hung up before Xavier could contradict him in any way. He then looked at Yasha, and asked, "Demons have their own post office?"  
  
"Not that I know of, but it's a good idea, isn't it?" She grimaced, and said, more seriously, "Anything's possible when dealing with the mystic."  
  
"Yeah, I know," he agreed bitterly, rubbing the remaining sleep out of his eyes.   
  
"You're rather sanguine for someone who just got mailed a severed head."  
  
He raised an eyebrow at her. "And you're rather sanguine considerin' it was your ex-boyfriend's head."  
  
That made her frown. "Cujo? Oh please, he was a Persaid demon! Okay, he was sweet on me, and maybe I took advantage of that, but believe me, I never did anything but use him for his underworld contacts."  
  
He wondered if that was really supposed to make it better. At his skeptical look, she added, "I am sorry the bonehead got killed. I thought he was smarter than that."  
  
"We have no idea what he was up against. But why would these Vantha think I'd give a shit about what happened to Cujo?" But it was barely out of his mouth before he realized, "Fuck - they know about us."  
  
She considered that a moment before shaking her head. "Not necessarily. They could have found out you paid him a visit … and knowing Cujo, he didn't sell me out. So he put it all on you."  
  
Logan nodded, honestly relieved. "Good. But I'm sorry he got caught in the crossfire. Who are the Vantha anyways? You never really told me."  
  
She shrugged helplessly. "I just assumed they were another demon mob - these suckers pop up like weeds, but die off like hothouse roses. Maybe if I was interested in joining I'd have learned more, but I had no interest; Fujimori was a prick, and I knew if he was associated with it, it sucked. No pun intended."  
  
Fair enough. He was tired enough that he slid down the counter and sat on the cool linoleum tiled floor, and she joined him, sharing the sheet with him so they were sitting with their shoulders touching. It struck him as so perfectly bizarre - they were both almost indestructible (well, her less so - he didn't have the sunlight and pointy pieces of wood problem), both too fucking old (although he had no idea how old he actually was - it was possible he was wrong), and both considered little better than animals, with a gift for killing. They were perfect for each other, and yet so very wrong. He hardly knew her at all - she played things close to the vest, just like he did - and he knew vampires as a species couldn't usually be trusted. But oddly, he trusted her; maybe because she could have killed him, but she didn't. The ultimate in trust exercises.  
  
"I got some people I can call for info," he finally said, leaning his head against a cupboard. "I'll find these bastards."  
  
"Don't you mean find out about them?"  
  
"No. They wanna come after me? Great - why don't I meet 'em in the middle?"  
  
She gave him a sideways glance, and smiled slyly, putting a cool hand on his thigh. "You really are a samurai. The best defense is a surprise offense."  
  
He decided to ignore that. "You don't have to come along."  
  
"Yes I do."  
  
He was torn about this. People around him got hurt, they died - but she was already dead, technically. And if a vampire could survive for a hundred and fifty years, would she really be in that much danger now? "Need to get some revenge for Cujo?"  
  
"That, and I ain't letting you go in alone. If there's some ass kicking to be had, you ain't cheating me out of my slice."  
  
That was another reason why he could love her. "So reminding you it might be dangerous and pointless is just catnip to you, is that it?"  
  
"Meow." She grinned at him, and he couldn't help but smile.  
  
He kissed her forehead, and wondered if his life would ever be less fucked up than it was now.  
  
7  
  
Bob knew he was still asleep when he saw his bedroom floor was undulating like the ocean.  
  
The carpet here was the same wine dark color it was in the hall, but now it was a riot of colors: metallic bronzes and greens, ruby red and onyx, with flashes of turquoise and amber, the yellow of spilled lemonade and the white of blind eyes.  
  
They were snakes by the dozens, by the hundreds, all swarming over the surfaces and each other, as a pillar of them began growing in the far corner, taking on the shape of a man. Cobras and coral snakes coiled and merged together, bleeding into the shapes of legs and trunk, copperheads, sidewinders, and boa constrictors becoming arms and neck, milk and garter snakes piling up into a head.   
  
The moon bright silver eyes emerged last, seemingly floating out from beneath the mass of multicolored scales, and Degei said, "I'm sorry to barge in on the mental plane, Bob, but I thought you might want to hear this right away."  
  
He propped himself up on one elbow and nodded, still feeling completely shagged out. "I'm all about the bad news. I'm assuming it's bad?"  
  
Degei nodded, the snakes settling around his neck, tails and tongues briefly flicking the air before solidifying into the body. "Are you all right? You seem more blue than usual."  
  
"Saw the folks. You know how it is."  
  
He made a noise of trepidation that was half groan, half hiss. "I've never liked the Powers. Too secretive and superior."  
  
"They are not people beings, that's for sure. So what's pissing on our parade now, mate?"  
  
"Followers of Camaxtli. There have been massive sacrifices on several planes."  
  
Bob groaned and closed his eyes, allowing himself to fall back on his pillow. Massive sacrifices in his name meant they had gotten the signal to spill blood in his name and power him up. It could be relatively benign - it could be simply to facilitate his transfer onto this plane. But since nothing about Cammy was benign, that didn't track. Besides, he probably already had the power to transposition Jean here - that couldn't be the point. He opened his eyes, and stared at the watery light on the ceiling, rippling like a disturbed pond. "Who are the big sacrificers? Got me a name?"  
  
The snakes rearranged themselves on his shoulders, signally a shrug. "All the usual suspects, although the Shafans have been unusually quiet. Word is you put the fear of Bob into them."  
  
"Bloody well right I did. They killed someone I knew, and seemed poised to open up a door between their dimension and this one. Not while I'm around they ain't."  
  
"They're not very bright."  
  
Bob scoffed. "Punning, are we? Things must be really bad."  
  
Degei let out a sibilant sigh, his shoulders rolling like waves. "It is. My babies here, on this plane … " He paused, and Bob looked up at him sharply. Since when was Deg afraid to tell him something? " … they tell me that there are plans to resurrect Itzli on this plane."  
  
Bob felt like he'd been kicked in the teeth by Eris. Bloody fucking hell - Itzli. "That's not good," he admitted.  
  
He scoffed. "No fucking kidding."  
  
Itzli -if he was known to Humans at all - was supposedly an Aztec god (like Cammy), the god of the knife, therefore the god of sacrifice. What wasn't known was he was a servant of Cammy, perhaps his best procurer of blood - because Itzli was death. With a simple flick of his hand he could cut the throats of everyone in his line of sight, and the sound of his voice alone was enough to kill. He wasn't bad news, he was the most horrible news imaginable - he didn't need to touch a single person to kill them dozens at a time. He was probably the closest thing to the Belial biblical "Four Horseman" that had ever existed.  
  
He was banished from the Earth plane by Ometecuhtli, who got fed up with the amount of power Cammy had, and thus began the end of Cammy's reign on Earth - it just wasn't as fun without his right hand death machine, although he could serve up steaming slabs of death himself. If Itzli was allowed to come back, there was no way in hell Jean was coming back at all - Cammy would use the body, but her personality would be completely gone. It would be like the old days, Cammy and Itchy, slaughtering the sheep and having a grand old pool of blood party. And Bob knew he couldn't call on Ometecuhtli for help, as he/she had dispersed itself not long after the fall of the Aztec empire. "Shit. Where?" To raise Itchy would mean blood - rivers and rivers of blood. But not just plain old blood; there'd have to be some special ingredients in the mix, and the ritual itself would probably level a city block.  
  
Degei shook his head helplessly, his eyes shining like moons. "I haven't found that out yet. But who is immune to Itzli besides us and the rest of the Aurelia?"  
  
Aww, fuck fuck fuck. It was great how, even if you were drowning, your hair could still catch on fire, and your insides could still be liquefied by the ebola virus. "The Silencias. Oh god fucking shit. At least it narrows it down. Maybe I can find them first." The Silencias was the collective name of semi-gods, demi-demi-gods, and a random assortment of accidental offspring, bastards, and quasi-relatives of the irresponsible and powerful, either deity or demon (or sometimes both). Singly they were generally nothing; together they were a force to be reckoned with. And they liked to stick together - safety (and power) in numbers. But, as their collective name suggested, they generally stayed quiet, laid low; this plane was not friendly to them, and not of their choosing. If they bothered to stick their heads out of their hidey holes, there was some bad shit going down. "They are so fucking dead," Bob grumbled, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. "When I find them, I'm stripping them of every power they have. If they're lucky."  
  
"Isn't that stepping over the bounds?" Degei asked nervously.  
  
"So what if it is? They can sic their parents on me - assuming they even take their phone calls, which I doubt. Why would they be stuck on this plane if they were tight with the parental units?" He sighed heavily. "This is so fucked."  
  
"I know." After a portentous pause, Deg added, "I'll help if I can."  
  
"I know you will." But Bob knew he was probably on his own here. And would he have it any other way? After all, spanking naughty gods was his job. Even if they did have daddies and mommies that could swat him down like a bug.   
  
But when you played with the fire of the gods, you had to expect a burn every now and again. 


	6. Part 6

8  
  
Yasha didn't believe he had a motorcycle that could get them to Los Angeles within hours, but as soon as the sun had set - and she had found him some clothes (did he really want to know why she got him a t-shirt advertising "McClennon's Meat Market"?) - he led her out to it, and advised her to hold on tight, as he'd never had a passenger on board when he kicked the bike up into turbo, or whatever the fuck it was called.  
  
She held on very tight, and she screamed when he engaged the engine, but it wasn't a scream of fear, but one of triumphant joy - she loved it. His kind of woman.  
  
She was obviously accustomed to riding or driving (probably driving) bikes as well; she knew to hold on but not restrict his movement, and she knew to move precisely with him, so as not to throw off the balance (especially at this velocity). Yes, he could easily love this woman.  
  
They made great time, as he suspected they would, and it was just past midnight by the time they got to Los Angeles. For a long time along the green coast of the Pacific Northwest, they'd had the moon dogging them, seemingly following them, but as soon as they neared the L.A. basin, it disappeared behind a vaguely yellowish curtain of smog. It almost seemed like an omen.  
  
He had called The Way Station in hopes that Bob was hanging around there, but no, he got the eternally tetchy Lia, who told him in no uncertain terms hadn't been around as of late, and somehow that was his fault. He then called Bob's Sydney place, only to get his voice mail. Rather than break the phone - which occurred to him - he decided to go to his secondary source of demon information - Wesley.  
  
That had its own shocks as well. Wes's answering machine now had a message about "business related inquiries" to his number at Wolfram and Hart. The fucks who tried to brainwash him! Well, after chewing him a new one at his "business phone", Wesley explained - fairly lamely - that Angel had taken over. Or been given it, but didn't really trust anyone.  
  
As it was, Wes thanked him for the fruit basket (which puzzled him, until he guessed Bob sent him one and put his name on it), and then added he was glad he called, because he had found some records on "mutant organizations" in the archives, and while he was still trying to crack some of the coding, he was pretty sure the records pertained to the Organization. He thought he might want him. Logan feared it might be a trap, but Wes was right - he wanted those files. So to L.A. they went. He briefed Yasha on all he knew about Wolfram and Hart, and Angel and his friends, just in case. Ironically, she had heard of Angel, but she had never encountered him.   
  
It wasn't difficult to find the Wolfram and Hart building. Of course he remembered it from the last time he was here (he dangled a lawyer out a window, hadn't he?), but it was such an ostentatious skyscraper, a missile of glass and steel always primed for launching, and a phallic symbol without compare. Unless you went around to the next block - this entire section of L. A. was an urban canyon of skyscrapers, a shiny monument to heartless capitalism. And then there was that undercurrent of pure blooded evil, which everyone seemed oblivious to, proving that wealth and power, up to a certain point, caused a special kind of blindness.  
  
In a bit of pointless defiance, Logan parked the bike on part of their neatly manicured lawn, just North of their pretentious sign, and he and Yasha approached the massive glass doors, together but at a distance from each other, keeping a good fighting distance between them. Logan sensed eyes briefly scud over them, but saw no one. His hands clenched into fists almost involuntarily.  
  
She stopped near the door, but he went on ahead - also part of the plan. He pushed open the door and sauntered inside, feeling like he was looking for trouble.   
  
It was remarkable how fast he found it.  
  
Waiting in the large, gilded foyer to meet him was a squadron of ten commandos, dressed in their best ninja black, most leveling surprisingly sleek and sophisticated automatic weapons at him, or older fashioned but still highly effective pump action shotguns. Save for one, standing slightly farther back and directly in his line of sight, holding what looked like a long barreled dart gun leveled on his chest. "That's far enough," the Filipino dart gun wielding commando said. Logan guessed he was the leader. "Turn around and leave quietly, and you won't have to get a half ton of lead in you."  
  
Logan gave him a sharp smirk. "You actually think that will stop me?"  
  
The commando's dark eyes were as hard as flint. "Yeah - even your pain tolerance isn't that good. But mostly, that part would be for fun. This would stop you." He waggled the dart gun ever so slightly. "Quoiiza demon toxin, something you couldn't possibly have been exposed to. With your system it would paralyze you for about, oh, twenty five hours, to be generous. Just think how much fun we could have with you in twenty five hours." He gave him a razorblade grin to match his own. "Walk away. Last chance."  
  
The door opened behind him, and Yasha said, "Oh, I don't think that's going to happen."  
  
To give credit to the rent-a-death-squad, only half of them trained their sites on her, while the rest kept their bead on him. Certainly commando boy never wavered. Yasha held up the back of her hand, and you could clearly see the flash of silver in between her fingers. But the silver was near the base of her fingers, no more - but then again, some throwing knives just weren't very big at all. A machine one of the commandos' had on bleeped, and she said coolly, "Yes, I'm a vampire, and maybe you should keep that in mind. Do you think your reflexes are so good that you can pull the trigger before I throw?" She was aiming that at the leader, who did have the smarts to look momentarily worried. "Would you like to bet your life on it?"  
  
He had no idea how many knives she had in her hand - he didn't ask - but all she had to do was flick her hand, and she could take down the leader and several of the men around him. After having seen her in action in Japan, he knew he could count on her to take at least half the group in no time flat. He had to admit, this woman was good. Probably why she carried the Blood name around like a battle flag.  
  
There was a moment of tense silence, feeling like the calm before the storm, when suddenly a familiar voice exclaimed angrily: "What the fuck is going on here?!"  
  
The commandos suddenly lost their nerve as Angel strode into the marble tiled lobby, Wesley following behind him. Angel looked the same as always -did vampires ever change? - but Wes had apparently decided to give contacts a try, as well as five o'clock shadow, and a scruffier hair style. It looked like he needed more sleep. It also looked like the past year or so had been very unkind to him, and he had hardened as a result.  
  
The leader turned partially to face him, but never took his weapon off Logan. "This man is top of the list, sir."  
  
Sir? He really was the boss around here, wasn't he?  
  
Angel frowned, dark brows drawing together. "List? What list?"  
  
"Gregario, " the leader said, nodding at one of the shotgun commandos. He slung his gun over his back, and took what looked like a Palm Pilot off his utility belt. Angel gave both him and it a skeptical look before snatching the Palm Pilot and giving it a good read. After a few seconds, he looked up at the leader indignantly. "A contain and kill list?"  
  
"Standard protocols are - "  
  
"I'm number six on this list!" Angel interrupted, throwing the Palm Pilot on the floor. It broke into a hundred different pieces, hard copy garbage. Then a slightly indignant look crossed Angel's chiseled face. "Why am I only number six?"  
  
"We ignored your name," the leader said, as if that explained everything.  
  
Angel glared at him, his brown eyes almost glowing with hate. "This goes away, now."  
  
The leader seemed confused. "What?"  
  
"The list - as of now, it's gone. Is that understood?"  
  
"I- is that wise? I mean - "  
  
"Do it, or your replacement will do it," Angel snapped.  
  
That did it. Very reluctantly, he lowered the weapon, and the commandoes followed his lead, lowering their weapons and shuffling off awkwardly, shoulders rounded and heads ducked low in shame. "Sorry," Angel said to Logan, as he watched them go. "I'm still new here, and they didn't exactly leave me an instruction manual on how to run a formerly evil empire."  
  
" 'S okay. I was hardly quakin' in my boots."  
  
"Yeah, I know." Angel cast a final harsh glance at the commandoes, then turned to face him. He was still unlike a lot of vampires he had encountered, in the fact that Angel was roughly the size and shape of a football player - well, those before the invention of steroids. Not lean and anemic like several he had killed, but surprisingly broad shouldered and sturdy. He was still far too pale, though, and the dark clothes he insisted on wearing didn't help. His gaze scudded to Yasha - who had pocketed her knives - and his eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Do I know you?" He asked, his voice taking on a icy edge.  
  
As usual, Yasha met his gaze fearlessly, with a coldness greater than his own. "Not personally, no. But I am Chishio Hime."  
  
Angel's eyes widened, and suddenly blazed with anger, while Wes looked mildly shocked. "Lady Blood?" Wes said. "Really? I'd heard you were taller."  
  
"Killer of The Order of the Templar?" Angel asked, although it hardly sounded like a question.  
  
Logan gave her a sidelong glance. "Order of the Templar?"  
  
"An ancient religious order dedicated to eradicating vampires," Angel told him, never taking his eyes off her.   
  
Yasha just shrugged, her face an icy mask. "They tried to kill me. I'd never have bothered them if they'd left me alone."  
  
"Every single one of them?" Angel said, spitting the words out like pellets. How many were there among the Templars?  
  
Her face remained expressionless, eyes defiant. "They were very much into vengeance. It was self-defense."  
  
Angel snorted in disbelief, but Logan felt she was right - if she was indeed telling them everything. Maybe Angel felt full force could only be used on demons - and the X-Men seemed to think it couldn't be used on anyone - but Logan was of the opinion that if someone attacked you, meaning to do serious harm, they were declaring war - and all was fair in love and war. That was probably the major dividing line between him and them, and always would be. But absolutes like that had a tendency to come back on you and smack you in the face - which he thought Xavier's crew would have figured out by now.   
  
"Besides," she added, with casual disdain. "That's ancient history, Angelus."  
  
The use of that name made him briefly flinch. "That's not my name anymore."  
  
"Oh, is that ancient history as well?"  
  
Zing. She was so good at it, Logan almost laughed. Wesley briefly lifted his eyebrows, a tacit "That must have hurt". Angel was hardly amused; his eyes continued to narrow, and the muscles in his jaw worked like they were trying to break through his skin. The tension was unbelievably thick, and Logan suddenly wondered if she was going to be forced to use her knives on Angel -if she even bothered with knives. Shit - who knew vamps could have pissing contests?   
  
"Hey, she's cool," he told him. "She's with me."  
  
Angel's eyes snapped back to him, and while some of the suspicion was gone, the intensity remained. "Why?"  
  
He glared back at him, not appreciating his tone of voice. "Because she helped me and she saved my life, Angel. What, do you think you're the only vampire who can turn over a new leaf?"  
  
"Yeah, he does, actually," A vaguely familiar, and slightly Cockney, voice said. Angel groaned and rolled his eyes, as if it was bad news, and a peroxide blond man in a long leather coat - who was also slightly transparent at the edges - started walking across the lobby towards him. He was lean and almost frail, with sharp cheekbones threatening to cut through a rather arrogant looking face. Didn't he look familiar?  
  
"Go away, Spike," Angel said through gritted teeth.  
  
"Yeah, right, watch me vroom," he replied sarcastically. He gave Logan a scrutinizing glance, then said, "You know, sideburns went out with disco. Or are they still big in the gay scene?"  
  
Logan stared at him, and finally placed the face. "I killed you."  
  
That seemed to puzzle everyone. "What?" Angel asked.  
  
Spike scoffed. "You wish."  
  
"No, I did, in another dimension. I cut your head off."  
  
"If only you could do that now," Angel muttered under his breath.  
  
"Hey, I heard that," Spike replied angrily.  
  
Wes had started coming towards him, holding a sealed folder that must have been the files he mentioned on the phone, and Yasha asked him, "Your building is haunted too?"  
  
Wes stopped short, and he got a sudden sense that he was still unsure - and therefore nervous - of her. But Wes kept his "stiff upper lip" front up, and they could almost see his face set like concrete. "No, not exactly. It's a long story." Wes kept the corner of his eye on her as he handed him the folder. "Here is all I could find for now. It seems to be written in a sort of code that no one seems to have the translation key for - you'll understand when you see it. But perhaps you can make more sense of it than I've been able to."  
  
He nodded, taking the file gratefully. "Thank you." He meant it too.   
  
Wes just nodded, accepting the thanks with an almost dismissive air, which struck Logan as quintessentially upper crust British. "If anything else comes up, I'll let you know. Their archives are massive. I think it'll take me years to get through even a third of it."  
  
"Why would a demon run place like this have any interest in mutants?" Yasha wondered, genuinely curious.  
  
Wes seemed slightly startled that she'd talk to him, but he was civil to her, in spite of his not trusting her. Maybe it was a demon hunter thing - he used to be a Watcher, and the Order of the Templars were demon hunters. Maybe he felt a certain camaraderie in spirit if nothing else. "Demons infiltrated the Organization, and may have had some hand in guiding the Organization and its principals. They viewed mutants as a very real potential threat to their way of life."  
  
Yasha nodded in understanding. "Humans alone were easy pickings. Ones who could … well, cut your head off, were a different animal altogether."  
  
"Exactly. And pitting Humans against other Humans was a nice side benefit."  
  
"Oh god, he's one of them freaks?" Spike exclaimed with a scoff. "Well, that explains the hair."  
  
"Do you ever shut up?" Angel snapped, giving Spike a look that could have stripped paint from the wall.  
  
But the vampire…ghost…whatever the fuck he was not only was completely unfazed, but looked slightly amused. "No."  
  
Angel turned back to face him, but the scowl he had for Spike seemed to melt off his face, and his look softened slightly. Maybe he was tired of fighting everyone, or decided Yasha couldn't possibly be as bad as Spike at the moment. "How're you doing? We heard about that mess a few months back."  
  
"I'm good," he lied, although Logan really wasn't sure it was a lie. For him, this was a positive bright spot in his life. "You?"  
  
Angel sighed, running a hand through his hair nervously. "Well, things have been pretty strange lately - "  
  
"While you ladies catch up on things, why don't me and the bird get to know each other?" Spike interrupted, walking around Angel and heading towards Yasha. "What're you doing with this fashion disaster, babe?"  
  
Yasha eyed him coldly. "Better than you. What's it like to be dead in two ways at the same time?"  
  
That seem to stop Spike in his swaggering tracks. "Hey."  
  
Wes sighed, and walked around Spike like he was pile of dog shit on the floor. "That's Lady Blood you're clumsily hitting on. I really wouldn't if I were you."  
  
"Wow, you're Blood?" Spike looked impressed. "Good job on those Templar idiots. Those buggers were always askin' for it."  
  
The door opened behind them, and both he and Yasha turned instantly, tensing for a fight. But what slipped in the door was unexpected but not necessarily hostile - well, exactly. It was a thin line.  
  
"Hello-"  
  
"-Logan," the Weird Sisters volleyed, as they split around the crowd of them and entered the spacious lobby of the building.  
  
Angel and Wesley visibly tensed, each picking a twin to keep an eye on, and unconsciously moving into a position where they could protect each other's back, while Spike backed up, suddenly looking panicked. "Whoa," he said, continuing to attempt back away from them. But he must have realized that that was pointless, and seemed to hide behind Angel instead. "What are these crazy bitches doing here?"  
  
"Hello-"  
  
"-to-"  
  
"-you too-"  
  
"-Spike," the Sisters said, giving him those stereo bright, empty smiles that promised death more assuredly than any sneer.   
  
If a vampiric ghost could be said to pale, Spike did.   
  
"What are you two doing here?" Angel asked, pained and wary.  
  
"We-"  
  
"-didn't-"  
  
'-come for-"  
  
"-you, Daddy-"  
  
"-we came for-"  
  
"-Logan."  
  
"Daddy?" Logan exclaimed, turning a sharp glare on Angel, who was so mortified he looked down and hid his face by rubbing his eyes. "You … created them?"  
  
"No … just Belinda. I didn't even want to do it … it's a long story," Angel mumbled towards the floor. The Sisters were walking in perfect, concentric circles around all of them, in opposite directions, and he couldn't shake the impression of sharks circling their prey, enjoying the taste of their fear. Their eyes - one silver-gray, one hazel-gold - gleamed, seemingly with their own internal light.  
  
Logan wasn't sure he followed that. "If you only turned one, who turned the other?"  
  
"I-"  
  
'-did," the Sisters volunteered, then gleefully added, "My-"  
  
"-mother-"  
  
'-my sister-"  
  
"-my mother."  
  
"What is it with you and crazy women?" Spike asked Angel, still attempting to use him as a human shield.  
  
Yasha leaned in, and whispered in his ear. "These are really them? I expected … something else."  
  
"Don't let they're appearance fool you," he whispered back. "They're screaming death on wheels."  
  
And they were. They didn't look like much - appearing sixteen was a hindrance, as was their penchant for awful clothing. Today was no exception: long silver leather coats, paired up with blue tie dyed shirts studded with multicolored crystals (there seemed to be a horse and rider on the shirts - an ad for an equestrian center?), jeans with appliquéd flames on the legs, and red and black leopard spotted boots. Their chestnut colored shoulder length hair was held back in loose ponytails at the nape of their necks, and it made them look younger than usual, along with their awkwardly loud clothes. But Logan was starting to wonder if it was camouflage, a way to lure potential victims into a false sense of confidence. If they ever noticed how empty their eyes were, he couldn't see anyone falling for it.  
  
"What are you doing here?" Angel asked again, exasperated.  
  
"We're-"  
  
"-not-"  
  
"-here for-"  
  
"-you, Angel-"  
  
"-we came for-"  
  
"-Logan."  
  
That made Angel and Wes look sharply between them. No one noticed that Spike seemed to have disappeared into thin air. "I hope that wasn't a threat," Angel warned them.  
  
"Yeah, girls, me too," Logan agreed.  
  
Their glitter painted lips pulled back into a mockery of a smile, all teeth, the surface as shiny as their eyes. "We-"  
  
"-wouldn't-"  
  
"-threaten you-"  
  
"-Logan. We-"  
  
"-like you. You-"  
  
"-have pretty nipples."  
  
Logan shook his head, wondering if he'd ever live that down, while Yasha tried to hide a laugh in a cough, and Angel exclaimed, "What?"  
  
"We did a job for Bob together," he said, hoping that explained everything. "I took my shirt off around 'em. A mistake I won't repeat."  
  
"He-"   
  
"-took-"  
  
"-us to-"  
  
"-Mexico. He's-"  
  
"-pretty all over." They volunteered, continuing to circle, continuing to leer at them all. They were doing this on purpose.  
  
"Bob?" Angel grimaced, and split glances between the Weirds. "You work for Bob now?"  
  
"We-"  
  
"-love-"  
  
"-Bob. Everybody-"  
  
"-loves Bob."  
  
"Not everybody," Logan objected. He could start naming names if forced.  
  
The Sisters shrugged in stereo, the exact same movement at the exact same time. They were creepy enough to make him want to take off running, and bizarrely he admired that. They had honed the inexplicably eerie to an astonishingly effective weapon. "Everybody-"  
  
"-who-"  
  
"-counts." They replied.  
  
"Why do you want me?" He asked, deciding a conversation with the Weirds was honestly the last thing he needed. Could he ask for the gun wielding commandoes back instead?  
  
"We-"  
  
"-were-"  
  
"-at the-"  
  
"-Way Station-"  
  
"-we heard you-"  
  
"-ask Lia about-"  
  
"-the Vantha. So-"  
  
"-we decided to-"  
  
"-look into it for-"  
  
"-you. We found something-"  
  
"-we thought you might-"  
  
"-like to see." They explained, never once stopping their circling.   
  
"The Vantha?" Wesley asked, looking at him. He tried to keep the Sisters in his peripheral vision, but that was a losing proposition.  
  
It suddenly occurred to Logan that in all the cussing and discussing of files, he had forgotten to mention the main reason why he'd called Wes in the first place. "Oh, yeah. It's some kinda demon mob I ran afoul of in Japan. Seems they wanna kill me now. Thought I'd introduce myself to them personally." He didn't bother to ask how the Sisters had found him, because he had learned to accept that they were, in a general and a specific sense, inexplicable. They were Bob's perfect soldiers, because they were as unpredictable as he was, and no one had any fucking clue exactly what all their powers were, and where they stopped.  
  
Angel raised an eyebrow at that. "Do you think that wise?"  
  
He held his hands out in an open shrug. "Think I got anything to worry about it?"  
  
"It's still possible -" Angel began, but never got a chance to finish.  
  
"I'm with him," Yasha interrupted. "We've beaten their splinters before - I'd be interested to see if they have any new tricks."  
  
Angel scrutinized her, and it was clear he didn't trust, and didn't like her, even though he didn't know her. It made Logan wonder anew just exactly how many people had been in the Order of the Templar. "If you hurt him …" Angel began, leaving the threat unspoken.  
  
"Logan can take care of himself," She countered breezily. "I wouldn't be with him if he couldn't."  
  
It was a compliment, and Logan knew it. But Angel still seemed suspicious.  
  
"Come-"  
  
"-on-"  
  
"-we don't-"  
  
"-have all-"  
  
"-night," the Sisters complained with odd cheer.  
  
"Do you have a cell phone?" Wes asked him. "I can call you if I find something."  
  
"No, but I should be at the Way Station, if you wanna call me there. Thanks."  
  
"No problem, just take care of yourself."  
  
"You too." Logan then looked at Angel with the smallest of shrugs. "Good luck with the evil empire."  
  
"Thanks, I think I'll need it. Keep in touch."  
  
Why were goodbyes always so awkward between them? Well, Logan found them awkward in general, but Angel must have as well, and together it was just a bad mix.   
  
As Logan followed the Weirds out the door of Wolfram and Hart, he wondered what they had found, and why it was so important they show him it now.  
  
If it was another head, he was going to find someone to sue.  
  
9  
  
His best guess was he was twenty two kilometers south-southeast of Uluru, but distances were so hard to guess in these really desolate, flat parts of the Never Never, he usually didn't bother.  
  
Just like temperature. It was probably a hundred something, and gods knew all the moisture felt like it had been wicked from his body already, running down his skin in rivulets. The sun glared overhead like it was in the final stage of a nova, and washed the color of the broad sky out to a white meagerly enhanced by tinges of blue.   
  
Bob was glad he didn't sunburn, as he had stripped down to a tank top and walking shorts, but he was still too hot. Should have gone with a speedo. At least he was bare foot - he devolved calluses hard enough to take the burning sand and the occasional jagged rocks; the insects and reptiles that bothered being out here were of no threat to him. He knew that from experience - this was hardly his first time wandering in the deserted part of the Outback. He owned part of it, but since he had it and never did anything with it (and never intended to - most of this land had been strip mined or tourist exploited enough), he was never positive where the boundaries were.  
  
"Ransom paid the devil," he sang, trying to fill the broiling silence with his own voice. "He whispers pleasing words. Triumphant are the angels if they can get there first." He would have rather been home resting up; he had a big battle ahead. But he sensed the aberrant use of energy out here - huge, malevolent, and familiar (and not tourists complaining that the desert was hot and dusty, and there was nothing here) - and he knew the throw down was on. He was too late, but he wanted to see what message had been left for him.  
  
The air shimmered so much in the glare it was hard to tell if he was seeing an optical illusion or not. It was a black line on the desert floor, moving with a sinuous grace but never going anywhere, and the air had a thick hum, like high tension power lines. A bloody shame there weren't any around here.  
  
The wind shifted towards him, and he smelled … carnage.  
  
Blood, death, spilled organs, the scent of raw meat being baked in the desert sun. The line of black on the sand glistened, nearly fidgeting with movement as the thousand upon thousands of flies fed on the remains spread out over the desert. It wasn't just flies either, although they were the largest contingent of insect life, and responsible for the buzzing. Bob could not see the end of the line; he only saw that it reached out in either direction.  
  
Bob closed his eyes and mentally projected himself above the scene.  
  
For about a mile in the flat desert, body parts were strewn about; people ripped completely apart, so their entire bodies could be used in the construction. The pieces were put out in the shape of a snake, its mouth wide and gaping, as if frozen in mid-strike. And the glittering carapaces of the flies and the beetles consuming this unexpected banquet made it look like it had feathers as well as scales.  
  
The feathered serpent. The mark of Camaxtli.  
  
The motherfucking bastard. Striking and taunting him in his own "back yard". He bet he got some real jollies out of doing this.  
  
This was a challenge as much as it was a put down. A symbolic "Find me if you can, asshole". Cammy was so certain he'd won this round, he decided to leave a calling card.  
  
Bob came back to himself and opened his eyes, so angry he felt strangely cold, even in this baking heat.  
  
Cammy thought it was all over? He hadn't even begun.  
  
Only now he had to nail that through his thick cranium - preferably before he killed him. If he could ever think of a way to kill him without hurting Jean.  
  
Damn it. Some days it just didn't pay to get out of bed. 


	7. Part 7

Bob started walking away, leaving the ominous drone behind him, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. The smell of death followed him across the sand, and he wondered where Cammy's next move would be. Los Angeles was too easy, too predictable - Cammy would expect him to go there. So where would he go ..?  
  
He shook his head. He couldn't worry about it. The Silencias was more important, and surely Camaxtli was trying to distract him from that. He couldn't be sidetracked. Cammy, the bastard that he was, could wait. He couldn't let Itchy come back, no matter what Cammy tried to do to stop him.   
  
And he would try and stop him; he knew that now. The only question was, how far was he willing to go? Could Bob force him to show himself?  
  
Considering good reverse psychology traps, Bob teleported himself back to Sydney, and wondered what the best way was to lure the Silencias into making a big mistake.  
  
10  
  
The Sisters led them to a cemetery so overgrown it could have been a park.  
  
Huge old trees slowly strangling with ivy, gnarled hawthorns and willows, great old oaks and sprawling pines, nearly hid the wrought iron fence that was starting to crumble, eroding in the face of neglect and time. Even the headstones looked as if they had been eaten away by something with an appetite for stone.  
  
The cemetery gate was locked … for approximately three seconds, as a single kick from the Weirds sent the lock clattering to the cracked stone walkway, and the gates swung back so violently he was shocked the hinges didn't snap. They led the way - of course - and he followed, with Yasha taking up the rear. The vampire ladies hadn't really said anything to each other, and Logan had no idea if that was good or bad.  
  
They walked past weedy and neglected plots, heading deeper into the abandoned cemetery, and as the smell of decomposition and mold started to get to him, he asked, "What the fuck are we doin' here? Pickin' up one of your friends?"  
  
"Patience-"  
  
"-Logan-"  
  
"-we're almost-"  
  
"-there. And-"  
  
"-you haven't introduced-"  
  
"-us to your-"  
  
"-new friend."  
  
"I think she can introduce herself."  
  
"Besides, I think you girls know a lot about me, don't you?" Yasha said. "You're some kind of telepaths, aren't you?"  
  
"Not-"  
  
"-exactly-"  
  
"-but how-"  
  
"-perceptive of-"  
  
"-you to notice."  
  
The Sisters stopped, a small, crumbling stele between them. "Here-"  
  
"-we-"  
  
"-are."  
  
In the darkness, it was hard to see anything, but it looked like something was etched into the stone monument. But who the hell knew what the fuck was on it? "This is Vantha?" He asked impatiently.  
  
"Don't-"  
  
"-you-"  
  
"-read Etruscan?" They asked sarcastically, their smiles almost glowing in the gloom.   
  
"It's a -"  
  
"-symbolic plinth, a-"  
  
"-marker left by-"  
  
"-her loyal followers. She's-"  
  
"-the Etruscan demon of-"  
  
"-death. She sees all, because-"  
  
"-she's mostly eyes, and is-"  
  
"-omnipresent, although we don't know how-"  
  
"-but death heralds usually are. Trick of-"  
  
"-the trade."  
  
"Vantha is a demon?" He asked, not completely sure he was following this.  
  
"No-"  
  
"-Vanth-"  
  
"-is the-"  
  
"-demon's name."  
  
"So the Vantha are what, their followers?" Yasha asked, a little quicker on the uptake.   
  
The grins of the Sisters grew so wide, it looked like their faces might crack. "Yes-"  
  
"-you're-"  
  
"-good."  
  
Logan turned to her, as she was easier to talk to than the Weirds. "So what does that mean exactly?"  
  
Yasha grimaced, looking suddenly quite grim. "It means they're not just a demon mob - they're a cult."  
  
"A-"  
  
"-death-"  
  
"-cult," the Sisters added gleefully.  
  
Logan hated to do it, but he shrugged. "So? What does that change?"  
  
"Well, a cult - especially one dedicated to demon goddess worship - can call on more resources than a simple demon mob. And what's worse than a guy who earns his paycheck killing you?"  
  
Although it was a rhetorical question, Logan realized what she was going after, and groaned. "A fanatic doing it for his god."  
  
Yasha nodded somberly, and the Sisters, still inordinately cheerful, said, "She's-"  
  
"-actually-"  
  
"-a merciful-"  
  
"-death god."  
  
"Her followers have-"  
  
"-lost the plot."  
  
"So why doesn't she intervene?" He wondered. If Bob had followers (did he?) and they did shitty stuff in his name, he'd not only stop them, but make them all join the Peace Corps or become compulsive toilet cleaners or something.  
  
"I-"  
  
"-doubt-"  
  
"-she's aware-"  
  
"-of them."  
  
"She's one of-"  
  
"-those gods that's-"  
  
"-somehow omnipresent, and yet-"  
  
"-never picks up her-"  
  
"-phone."  
  
That could have been a joke. There was almost no way to tell with the Weirds. "So does this Vanth cult have a home base?"  
  
Their stereo smiles faded, but their eyes remained bright. "We're-"  
  
"-not-"  
  
"-sure yet-"  
  
"-we have-"  
  
"-our contacts looking-"  
  
"-into it."  
  
"Where are these contacts?" He wondered.  
  
They smiled again, and he took that as bad news. "The-"  
  
"-Way-"  
  
"-Station."  
  
He sighed, shoulders sagging. He should have guessed. "Fine. Let's go get a drink."  
  
"You're-"  
  
"-buying," they said cheerfully.  
  
He supposed he was. He imagined he was going to pay for this one way or another.  
  
11  
  
The redhead reeked of humanity, and something else. Perfume, leather, and … a demon he couldn't name.  
  
On sight, she was un-fucking-believable. She wore an achingly tight black leather sheath dress, with a skirt that ended the top of her thighs, and a plunging neckline where her extremely ample cleavage spilled over the fabric, straining it to the point of bursting. She also wore a gold choker around her slender throat, and knee high black leather boots with fuck me heels - she was on patrol for something, that was for sure. Hannibal wished he was able to go inside tonight, but no, it was his turn to police the fucking doors.  
  
Her long red hair spilled artfully over her shoulders, and a diamond stud glittered in her right eyebrow. She had beestung red lips that matched the red of her eyes (no help - a lot of demons had red eyes), and he didn't really notice if she was pretty or not, because she had the greatest tits he had ever seen - the rest was irrelevant. "Hey there, tiger," she said, her voice tinged with a hint of an accent. British? Upper class American? "Any chance I can get in?"  
  
"I don't know," he said, unable to keep from leering at her. Did she realize what torture it was to keep most of his eyes on her face? "You do realize this bar's kind of rough, don't ya? 'Specially for you half-breeds."  
  
She grinned slyly. "I like it rough."  
  
He was glad he wasn't sitting down, or he'd have fallen off his stool. It took him a moment to regain the ability to speak coherently, and then he said, "Hrn mhaye." He tried again. "Sure, go in. But if you need any help, give me a shout."  
  
Her smile made her eyes light up. "I definitely will, big guy." As she sashayed past him, into the club, she ran a finger along his chin, and he almost passed out. He also felt a tingle of real, raw power - whatever kind of demon she was, she wasn't a wimpy kind.  
  
Why didn't the knockouts ever show up when he was on indoor bouncer duty? Life was so fucking unfair.  
  
***  
  
He noticed her right away.  
  
In a sea of beings - some attractive, many not - she stood out like a beacon of sex. Crowding up to the bar, her hair glowing like flames, Gyges found himself unable to tear his eyes away from her. Even the sweep of her graceful neck and back was enough to give him a hard on.   
  
He supposed, in retrospect, opening up a demon club in the heart of Romania was a bad idea. At the time, though, it seemed like a no brainer - heart of the vampire myth, tourist draw for goth freak Humans who'd be inclined to be demon fuckers anyways … but so far, he'd been struggling to pay for the booze every month. It was a misfire of epic proportions, and worst of all, there were hardly any hot chicks coming in.  
  
Until tonight. And she looked half-breed - he preferred half-breed. Well, sometimes you just got lucky.  
  
Shifting from his velvet recliner, he put his glass of Scotch aside, and toggled the private comm switch. "Hern," he said, waiting for the bouncer on the floor to respond.  
  
It was a moment before he responded, the noise of the crowd nearly swallowing his voice. "Yeah chief?"  
  
"Redhead at the bar. See her?"  
  
There was a pause, a brief burst of disco white noise. "Yeah?"  
  
"Give her a pass. I want her."  
  
"Gotcha. She is a choice piece of ass, ain't she?"  
  
"Yes. And don't you dare move in on her - is that understood?"  
  
He may have grumbled - it was hard to tell with the music - but he acquiesced with a well considered, "Yes boss." After a pause, he wondered, "Think they're real?"  
  
It was easy to tell what he was referring to; she was so top heavy, he was surprised she was able to stand upright. "Probably not, but who cares?"  
  
Gyges sat back, closing the connection, and watched her on the security monitor. He had cameras covering the entire club, giving him a good view of everything - from the dance floor to the restrooms - always searching for adequate candidates. Most of the time he had to make do with ones that were homely, and sometimes ones that weren't even half-breeds. He preferred the half-breeds; he felt a kinship with them … even if he was inherently their better. Well, that couldn't be helped, could it? He was the better of everyone on this fucking plane - he just wished he could use it more to his advantage. But why bother? These beings were smelly, stupid, weak, and annoying. The fact that he was half of them bothered him no end.  
  
Hern approached her, got her attention, allowing him to see her profile. It was impressive - delicate jaw, patrician nose, high cheekbones, eyes as red as rubies. He wondered if he could make this one last for a while - beauty like hers was so rare, it was a shame to use it all up in one go.   
  
But just looking at her as Hern told her she was invited to a VIP party upstairs, he got a sense of real power from her … almost frightening power. She might just last a while regardless of what he did.  
  
Maybe this really was his lucky night.  
  
She smiled at the invite, and … did she glance towards the camera? No, couldn't be; she just glanced in its direction. It was coincidental.  
  
She walked with Hern towards the hidden elevator, her hips swinging more than was necessary, showing off a fabulous ass. She was a born cocktease. He wondered if anyone would miss her.  
  
He glanced at the front room of his upstairs hideaway, which appeared to him as through a semi-opaque veil. It was, in fact, a wall separating his nest from the trap of the rest of the room. That was one of his powers, the ability to expand the spaces of molecules, so he could see through supposedly solid things, and walk through equally seemingly solid things. But they weren't technically; he walked through nothing. He simply made them part, and since natured abhorred a vacuum, as soon as his influence was gone, they put themselves back together again. For about a century, it was entertaining, but then it started to get old. And, because he was only a half breed, it was also exhausting. Seeing through was nothing, but passing through or reaching through … sometimes it wasn't worth the effort.  
  
Life was tiring. This plane was tiresome. It was all some awful conspiracy to keep him bound here, to this stark nothingness, this waste of life forms and time. And for what? What could merit this level of punishment?  
  
Oh, yeah, conspiring to overthrow some gods. But hell, conspiring?! That was like convicting someone of almost pulling the pin on a hand grenade - it didn't bloody well count, did it?! Shit; they might as well have damned him for having a hangnail. Who didn't conspire to overthrow those pompous blowhards?  
  
He heard the hum of the elevator as it came up to the floor, as the doors slid open, and sat in perfect stillness behind his wall as the girl stepped out cautiously, looking around. "Hello?" She asked, taking in the room. Done up in velvet and brocades, red and gold hues cut with a smidgen of purple, it looked very much like the lobby of an upper class brothel. It was really a posh feeding chamber, but no need to bother the silly little thing with that. "A private party, huh?" She said to herself, as she finally spotted the open bar. As she approached it, the elevator doors didn't just close behind her, but the lift instantly descended - she wouldn't be leaving here without his say so. And he wasn't saying so.  
  
As she poured herself a drink, oblivious to the nature of her death trap, she started singing to herself. "And not to pull your halo down, around your neck and tug you off your cloud, but I'm more than just a little curious, how you're planning to go about making your amends to the dead."  
  
What a curious song. Was she just singing with the music thudding through the floor? He didn't know; he didn't speak French. But it didn't seem to be following the right rhythm …  
  
No matter. He gulped down the last of his scotch and levered himself out of his chair, making the molecules pull themselves apart so the wall opened for him, and he stepped through the sudden gap, into the main chamber.   
  
Even though he came through when her back was turned, she was suddenly facing him now, drink in one hand, other hand on her hip. She didn't look surprised, even as the wall healed up behind him. "Wow, so you're the benefactor, huh? I thought you'd be younger."  
  
He stared at her, taking her measure. Conceited; she knew how pretty she was, and expected people to worship her for it. Was she in the wrong place. "You have no idea how old I am, girl."  
  
She scoffed, and had a swig of her drink. "So what is it you think you're gonna do to me? Oh, wait, I got it. Naughty naughty."  
  
He narrowed his eyes at her, starting to get a sense of power from her. A strong one - good. She'd be filling.   
  
"Do you think pretending not to be scared is going to impress me?"  
  
"Ain't an act. So what are you calling yourself nowadays?"  
  
He hated her more every second. He especially loathed her arrogance, and implied familiarity. "I am called Guy."  
  
She shook her head. "Naw, see, you don't look like a Guy. But if I pronounce it the French way, Ghee, I think we can work it."  
  
He glared at her, hating her with a vengeance. Consuming her would be a mercy - it would spare the world from her. They almost didn't deserve it. "Do you really think you have grasped this situation?"  
  
A slow, evil smile seemed to creep across her face, eyes glowing like fire. "I've grasped it fine, Ghee. What about you?" She then added, as a taunting lyrical refrain, "Your halo slipping down to choke you now."  
  
He started to feel the power then - intense, mind-numbing … not just a regular half breed. Oh shit. His intention to back through the wall and get Hern to toss her out was drastically cut short. "Freeze." And he did, just like that; he couldn't move a muscle, couldn't shift a molecule. Oh no - oh gods no! "See me as I am," she said … and disappeared.  
  
Suddenly in her place was a tall man, wearing jeans and leather biker books (without high heels), and a black t-shirt with an odd bald man drawn on it, alongside the logo, "Cheap, but not as cheap as your girlfriend." His golden brown hair was artfully mussed, and he had the bluest eyes …  
  
Oh shit. Oh shit oh fuck oh shit.  
  
Bob.  
  
"I make a kick ass babe, don't I Ghee?" He said, with a bright, hard grin. "I think I just may fantasize about myself later."  
  
He wanted to ask "What do you want?", but he couldn't speak either. "What do I want?" Bob repeated, as if he said it aloud. "Why are you still drinking the energy of Humans? I thought you agreed not to do that anymore. And yeah, you can speak."  
  
"You fucking son of a bitch!" He roared. "Go fuck yourself, you fucking misfit! Get the fuck out of my club before I fucking kick your fucking ass!"  
  
Bob just gave him that predatory, cheery grin that skirted the edge of arrogance and insanity. "You fucking done?"  
  
"No I am not, you fucking bastard! Why did you bother with this show, you fucking nut job?!"  
  
"Because I wanted to see if you were breaking your pact. 'sides, it was worth it all just to see the look on your face when you realized you were the meal this time."  
  
"You fucking son of a bitch!"  
  
"Technically, I wasn't born. But if I had been, I'm sure she'd have been a bitch, yeah."  
  
He glared at him, loathing this creature. Did those poor son of a bitches downstairs realize what a dangerous being he was? "Eat me, you motherfucker."  
  
"Now now, I don't do that; that's your department," Bob replied cheerily, and set his drink aside. "How many people have you killed, Gyges?"  
  
He glared at him, refusing to answer. "Some of us need to survive, you know."  
  
Bob shook his head. "Not like that. Don't even try it, I'm not going to buy it."  
  
"You're a reject, Bob; the Powers wouldn't even take you back if you spent the next century kissing their asses."  
  
"Actually, if I did repent for my rebellious ways, and follow their laws, they probably would take me back. But, as that great philosopher Groucho Marx said, I'd never be a member of a group that would have me. And frankly, they're a buncha pricks. Kinda like you. So where's your brother, Ghee?"  
  
He scowled at him, surprised he never guessed his actual intention for being here. "Cottus hardly checks in with me."  
  
"I'm sure he doesn't. But that doesn't mean you don't know where he is."  
  
"Go away, Bob. Do you want me to say it? Fine - I won't feed on Humans anymore. Now fuck off."  
  
Bob's grin was an evil thing; it seemed charming, it seemed almost giddy. But his eyes glittered like razorblades buried inside the white flesh of a rosy red apple. "Nope. You don't bullshit the king of the bullshitters, Ghee - you were trusted once. That was your final shot."  
  
"You are not taking me down," he snarled, more of a prayer than a statement. It didn't matter that no one would ever know it - Bob didn't brag. Bob had no need to brag. Beings with real power had no need to parade it out for the great unwashed; they just were. They glowed like torches, like bonfires, and consumed anything that fell into their path. It was the way of the world - it was the way of the gods.  
  
Bob gave him that cockeyed grin again, not even bothering to hide the malevolence simmering under the surface. The blue in his irises started to bleed into the white of his eyes. "I don't care that the Silencias kicked you out. You will tell me now where they were the last time you saw them, or I will take it by force. I know you wouldn't like that."  
  
"But you would like that, wouldn't you?" He snapped, rage covering for the bowel chilling fear. It was over; of course it was over. He couldn't fight Bob, and none of the hired demons downstairs could lift a finger against him, even if he could somehow unfreeze himself long enough to call for them.   
  
"No. I'm not like you - I don't feel any joy in using my power against beings unable to defend themselves against it."  
  
He was incensed to realize that Bob was speaking about using his power against him as if he was a mere Human. "I am not one of them," Gyges said, before he realized this wouldn't help him. But he wasn't; he wasn't some blind creature scrabbling around in the dark. He was a true god child, a spawn of power - so he was part weak flesh. That wasn't his fault, and besides, he was as good as any fucking god. They were too blind to see it, and exiled him here for no reason at all.  
  
"I agree," Bob said, eavesdropping on his thoughts. "You are like them, but that's why you were left here. The gods are big on "do as I say, not as I do". I thought you'd have figured that out by now, Ghee. Tell you what - tell me where you last heard your brother or the Silencias was, and I'll only take your powers away."  
  
"I'd rather you kill me," he said, and meant it. If he had to be humiliated by Bob, he'd rather not be living proof of its occurrence. And he'd rather not live among the sheep as one of them.  
  
Bob simply ducked his head, blue energy bleeding through his skin and limning his body like an afterimage. "Tell me where the Silencias have been, or you live among them, as them, for as long as you hang on to this mortal coil, Ghee."  
  
The fucking bastard meant it too. What the fuck had Cott and his stuck up, tight ass friends done now? Were they not smart enough to avoid the wrath of Bob? "What have they done?" He asked, stalling for time he knew he would never have. But he did want to know - he wanted to know what sin was so grave it led to his execution. Killing a few dozen - okay, maybe a few hundred - people just didn't seem to warrant such a punishment.  
  
"They're going to raise a beast," Bob said simply. He was almost too bright to look at now, a living pillar of blue flame, his eyes like supernovas. "I'm not going to let them."  
  
"At any cost?" As much as he hated Bob, he knew he wasn't really cruel, he wasn't as petty as certain god parents. Whatever could push him to this must have been bad … or personal. Possibly both.  
  
Bob paused for so long that he thought he wasn't going to answer him. "Yes," he finally admitted. "Whatever the cost."  
  
God help the Silencias. If they could find any god willing to front for them.  
  
They were so fucked, he almost felt more sorry for his shithead brother than he did for himself.  
  
12  
  
It turned out to be a total waste of their time.  
  
Shortly after they arrived, and Logan bought a round of beers for the Sisters, Yasha, and himself from a very sour Lia, a couple of the Sisters contacts turned up. One turned out to be that annoying red headed Aussie vampire who was hired to find demons for that ultimate fighting contest on Dis. As soon as he saw Logan, he obviously recognized him, as he paled so much he went transulent, and turned to leave, but the Sisters beckoned him back. The poor vamp was even more afraid of the Weirds than of him, confirming Yasha's previous statement that vamps were afraid of the Weirds. That made them oddly sensible for a parasitic race.  
  
Red reported nothing odd in the warehouse district or West Hollywood or East L.A. - apparently potential hot spots for bad mojo - and gratefully took his leave after the Sisters complimented him on his work, and suggested he check out Oakland. Logan never said anything, but he stared at him, so much that he was certain he was going to find out if vampires could actually piss themselves.  
  
The second "contact" was a Frenik demon (like a Ressik, but somehow not - he didn't really understand the distinction, except Freniks apparently smelled more pencil shavings) who wore sunglasses, and startled the hell out of him by having a female voice. It looked male ..! Did demons have transsexuals too, or was the gender line obliterated with some species? She (?) reported no unusually activity in Beverly Hills (!), another "hot spot". The Sisters sent her to Salinas.  
  
They spent the rest of the evening waiting for the third contact, the intriguingly named Urp. During which time, Logan found his boredom countered by watching the show.  
  
Rags was sitting in his corner stool, annoying Lia, and while he had no idea why he was glad to see he still had his head, Logan figured maybe irritating Lia was his one saving grace. They were at a testy silence when Thrakazog squelched into the bar. And he did squelch - he didn't walk, or slither - he seemed to ooze very quickly, and Logan checked to see if he left a slime trail (no).   
  
Logan was willing to bet that Lia had forcibly removed all the Elton John songs from the jukebox, so Thrack could not play them, but once he squelched to his corner with his drink (it was unclear how he managed to hold it - he really did look like nothing but a tall pile of slime), they had five minutes peace before he started to screech along with Beck.   
  
Logan expected Lia to whip a mug at his head, but surprisingly, all she did was give him a caustic look. She then went over to Rags, and started having an intense conversation with him. After several agonizing seconds, rags got up and walked over to Thrack. He threw that glitter stuff on him, said a few lines of gibberish, and Thrack - and his awful, cat on a cheese grater voice - vanished with a whoomp. Rags then went back to his stool, accompanied by a small round of applause, and from what Logan could tell, Lia paid Rags in Long Island ice teas.  
  
Logan only briefly wondered where Rags sent him - he was gone, so who cared? But after an hour or so, Thrack squelched in the door, his poor excuse for a head looking even more melted and amorphic than usual. That meant he was upset, he gathered.  
  
After ranting about "never being so offended in all his life", Thrack ordered a 'sex on the beach' and squelched back to his usual spot, but this time he didn't dare sing.  
  
After watching all of this was cool detachment, Yasha asked, "Are all the demons in Los Angeles crazy?"  
  
All Logan could do was shrug. It seemed like it, but he hadn't met them all.  
  
Finally he asked the Weirds where the hell Urp was, as dawn was slowly creeping on, and he knew he had to get Yasha out of here before them. Maybe not if Bob had shown up, but even Lia didn't know where the hell he was. The Weirds admitted it was odd for him to be so late since he was only checking out Napa Valley (!) (wine was evil?), but they admitted he could be destracted by a "really good goat".  
  
He so didn't want to know why that was. They almost told him, but he told them he'd paid Thrack to start singing again if they did.  
  
At least he knew the Weirds had a weakness. 


	8. Part 8

Urp didn't show. The Weirds attempted to call him, but he didn't answer his cell phone. They decided to try and go after him, starting with the dairy farms first. It was that nugget of information that made Logan decide now was a good time to leave.  
  
As it was, it was almost dawn, and he felt tired anyways (although that could have been psychosomatic), so he left them to it. The Sisters said they'd come get him if something panned out, which sounded more like a threat than it honestly should have.  
  
He and Yasha found a cheap motel several blocks away that oddly enough offered special "day rates", but when he met the manager he knew why: while he looked Human, he smelled demonic, and Logan figured he catered to a specific niche market - demons who needed to get out of the sun. A good gig if you could get it.  
  
The room was small and not terribly attractive, but the curtains were so thick they could have been made of kevlar - they blocked out every smidgen of potential daylight. "They should have called this place the Vampire Arms," Yasha quipped, also noting the location of a blood bank right across the street. The vamp version of take out?  
  
They were both tired, but not that tired, as it turned out. Not that he was complaining. Besides, sleeping never really worked out for him (much like Thrackazog and singing).  
  
But he had to fall asleep eventually.  
  
At first he didn't know he was asleep. When he felt the hands moving up his body, the lips brushing his stomach, he thought it was just Yasha, displaying her vampire lust and stamina. But her hands were cold - these were not.  
  
He opened his eyes to a bright room, sunlight flooding into a white room, and then he smelled her, a millisecond before she moved up, propping herself up on her elbows so she could look down directly into his face.  
  
Jean.  
  
Her auburn hair created a veil between him and the rest of the room, and her eyes were almost more brown than red (almost). Her smile was sensual and sleepy. "You know, I always did wonder what it would be like with you," she said. "I usually went for the reserved guys, you know? So even if I did touch their minds, I wouldn't be overwhelmed."  
  
He raised an eyebrow at that, sliding his hands around her naked waist. "I'm overwhelming?"  
  
Her smile became sardonic. "You know you are. You're the glowering volcano at the back of the room."  
  
"I didn't know volcanoes could glower."  
  
"You know what I mean."  
  
"Maybe." He was aware, on one level, that this was just more manipulation, Camaxtli exploiting his desire for her. And yet ... most of him just didn't care. "Do you think you can take me?" Only belatedly did he realize he meant that in a couple different ways, and in one way was specifically addressing Camaxtli.  
  
"I'd like to find out," she said, and he wondered which of them was talking. But then she kissed him, passionately, languorously, and he forgot all about it.  
  
He ran his hands up the smooth line of her back, through her luxurious soft hair, and maybe she was warm as if feverish. Who cared?  
  
Her body fit his perfectly, meshing as if they were made to be together, and she rolled over, pulling him on top of her, never breaking their kiss. Her body wrapped around him like a snare, her skin as soft as silk.  
  
If her filling his senses wasn't enough, he could sense her in his mind now, her sensations and his twining together, so much so that he started to lose his sense of self. He didn't care. Who could care when it felt so good?  
  
But as the river of her flowed through his mind like molten lava (who here was really the volcano?), he had a sudden ... memory? Thought? What was it?  
  
It the feeling of her feverish heat that must have triggered the sudden memory of Elena. She was standing in the field of snow, wearing his shirt (the one she died in), the truck behind her - the way he saw her the last time, before she blew her own brains out, painting the pristine white with the contents of skull. But she wasn't holding her gun this time, and her eyes were not glazed with illness; they were clear and bright with the fierce intelligence they must have held before the company made her ill and condemned her to a miserable death. "Don't let this happen," she insisted, and it threw him. What? He didn't remember that - what the hell was that?  
  
The confusion made him realize that Jean was going deep into his mind - the sensory overload of the pleasure was a distraction.  
  
He had no time to react; Camaxtli knew it at the same time he did. He broke away from the kiss, just in time for Jean to ram her fist straight through his heart.  
  
His adamantium ribs splintered like bone, and he could feel them burst out his back, along with her fist and the majority of his ventricles. The pain was excruciating, and he knew he should be dead - not conscious, not feeling this - but this was a dream, it wasn't real. No matter how it felt, it wasn't real.  
  
It just felt like it.  
  
She was a god now, so of course she could break him; she could have killed him with simply a word. But she didn't … because where was the fun in that?  
  
Jean's eyes were now flames, her face twisted into a rictus sneer full of so much hate and malice it looked inhuman. That was Camaxtl's true face - it looked vaguely like Jean, but he was just wearing her skin. "Stupid little Human - you're nothing. Let Bob know it's too late - there's nothing he can do. And I can take you too, any time I want."  
  
He woke up with a jolt, as if spit out, his heart hammering in his intact ribcage. Yasha hardly stirred, already accustomed to his violent awakenings, leaving him to stare up at the stucco ceiling and try and ride out the wave of nausea coursing through his body.   
  
The air conditioner hummed like a leaf blower in the parking lot, and there was a glow bleeding from the edges of the curtain, suggesting daylight outside (but none had leaked in the room as of yet). Goosebumps prickled across his skin, but only partially due to the cold air coming from the rattling machine hidden behind the industrial drapes.   
  
All was lost, wasn't it? All of it. All of her.  
  
He was not getting back to sleep, he knew it, so he went to take a shower. Maybe he could go back to the Way Station, and wait for either Bob or the Weirds to appear, whichever happened first. Or not - he really didn't care. Maybe he should go see a movie, see what was playing down in Chinatown - anything so he didn't have to think.  
  
But he couldn't stop thinking.  
  
He turned the shower on full blast, filling the cramped and slightly mildewed with a blast of steamy, heavily chlorinated air.   
  
He couldn't stop thinking, and he desperately wished he would. It left him so enervated standing up seemed like a chore. He slid down the urine yellow tiles and sat down on the bottom of the heavy porcelain bathtub, letting the scalding water pummel him like hail.  
  
If - when - Camaxtli came back to this plane, he wouldn't let Jean survive in any way, would he? She was just an instrument to get back here, and then she was gone. And he couldn't even warn her, as Camaxtli wouldn't let him. So how to save Jean?  
  
Kill Camaxtli. But how did they do that without hurting Jean?  
  
They didn't - end of story. Unless Bob pulled a rabbit out of his hat, she was doomed.   
  
There had to be a weakness, and the weakness was, Horatio, in the flesh - Camaxtli was "dead" on the higher planes. Jean had been his escape hatch, his emergency life raft. An avatar who was quite literally the vessel of a god. But until the god fortified the installation - until he scoured out the last vestiges of the Human - it had a flaw; a fatal flaw.  
  
If Jean came back to Earth, he would have to kill her as quickly as possible, before Camaxtli totally wiped her out.  
  
Kill her to save her - god, how horrible irony could be.  
  
(But he'd done it before, hadn't he?)  
  
Logan dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, making him see red and black, and didn't even try to follow that thought - he didn't want to know. He never wanted to know.  
  
The water pouring down his face, his chest, between his thighs, was starting to turn tepid. Either the hotel had a small water heater, or he'd been in here longer than he thought. Probably the latter - time flew when you were in agony.  
  
He understood why Elena had popped up in his head, a memory that wasn't a memory - another surprise from Bob; mental circuit breakers to keep Camaxtli from getting too deep in his head. Since the "flavor" of Bob was probably lousy all over his mind, it had probably been child's play burying "memories" that were really little bits of Bob, tripwires if Camaxtli crossed some invisible line - and Logan didn't know of it, so neither did Jean (and, by extension, Camaxtli). And his mind was so fucked, how would Camaxtli know a false memory from a real one?  
  
But why had Bob chosen Elena as a "model"? Because of the emotions that she'd engender, the shock like a blast of cold water to the face? Or was it deeper, more subtle than that?  
  
He had decided he could have loved Elena, but really only after she was dead. And why? Because she was one of the rare ones - the rare people who did what they had to do, no matter how ugly. He hoped she hadn't done what she did, he hoped their could have been another way … but was there? No, not at all; she'd done the only thing she could do. When push came to shove, she shoved - and how unique was that? She was probably his "soul mate", normal Human or not, scientist or not, because he could - had, would - shove back himself.  
  
Could Scott do it? If confronted by evil hiding in the form of Jean, and Logan told him to blast it so hard he pulped her organs, broke every bone in her body, would he? No, of course not - look how he fell apart when Cressida was killed, and he didn't even like her, nor did he order her to her death. She was another one that shoved back, but then again, probably all Organization candidates were.   
  
No matter his physical age, Scott really was just a kid - the big bad world remained something of a mystery to him. He thought he knew what he needed to do, thought he was tactically efficient, and surely he was as good as book learning could leave you, but he hadn't grasped the hard reality that sometimes you had to do things that repulsed you; sometimes you had to make an awful decision, get your hands dirty, and learn to live with it. It wasn't just "taking one for the team", it was sometimes taking someone else for the team.  
  
And in a world as vicious and fucked over as this one could be, sometimes that meant killing the thing you loved.  
  
Scott wasn't mentally or physically ready for it. Even if his hand was forced, it would destroy him afterwards. Logan knew what he was - he was a killer. That's what he was made to be, right? And even before the Organization got a hold of him, pumped him full of molten metal, he was a stone cold killer - as the remains of the Yashida and Takabe crime families could attest, if they all weren't extremely dead.  
  
It was why his current "soul mate" was a vampire. No matter what Bob said, what Xavier said, he was born and constructed for one thing: the kill. It was what he was good at; it was his soul talent.  
  
It would break him - he wasn't a complete monster (exactly … yet). But it would probably turn out like the last time he had a major shock to his system, after the whole "weapon x" shit blew up: he'd be crazy for a few months, but, as Marc had pointed out, he healed even from his mind being broken. So he'd have (another) psychotic break, go live in the wilderness for a while, and slowly recover his sanity, increments at a time. Maybe, if he was lucky, he'd never remember what he'd done - all this time would be wiped clean from his memory like chalk from a blackboard. He would never remember Xavier or Bob, or Elena or Yasha or Jean.  
  
He would never remember killing the thing he loved.  
  
Logan opened his eyes to the now cold water, letting the hard drops of water pelt his naked eyes. At least that way, he could blame the tears on the chlorine.  
  
13  
  
He left a note for Yasha, then left the hotel. It was a hot L.A. afternoon, redolent of smog heavy with exhaust, and he didn't feel ready to face the Way Station yet, so he wandered off to Chinatown and ducked into a theater - maybe being forced to mentally translate Mandarin would get his mind off things.   
  
But after twenty minutes of sitting through yet another ultra-violent gangster film, he was even more irritated than before; it wasn't helping. The only thing that would help was getting very drunk, which he couldn't do. His stomach grumbled like he was hungry, but he couldn't imagine eating. Maybe a beer would shut it up.  
  
He wandered to the Way Station, hoping for a fight but knowing better than to count on it, and when he got there, he saw a bartender on duty he'd never seen before - a sort of snaky looking humanoid with a vague resemblance to a Star Trek alien (Cardassians?), although her hair was a violent violet, clashing with her high intensity yellow eyes that seemed to glow in the dimness. She smelled a little like fruit leather.   
  
And even though he didn't know her, she knew him. She drew him a beer, and introduced herself as Ytoj - he had no idea how she pronounced it, never the less spelled it. Was that on her driver's license? Ytoj told him the Sisters had no leads on Urp, but would get in touch as soon as they did. Logan thanked her, took his beer to a back table, and decided to see if, by shot gunning many beers, he could get a momentary buzz.   
  
Ytoj was game, setting him up with many beers and watching him knock then down with a sort of scientific curiosity, but it seemed to be all for naught. So after fifteen, he decided to just sit back and enjoy the peace while he could, as the demon crowd always got lively later on. And that wasn't even counting the Sisters.  
  
As soon as he got the drift Ytoj might be flirting with him, he folded his arms on the table and dropped his head down, hoping she'd think he finally passed out. In a way, the darkness was nice. He briefly wondered if he should call New York and tell Xavier that Jean had to die.  
  
He'd been like that for about three songs when he sensed … something. It was hard to say what, just a general tingling, a sense of power being used. He raised his head, just in time to see a familiar figure come in the door.  
  
Ytoj seemed to bristle, her ropy, scaled neck almost puffing out in her hostility. "How the fuck did you get through the barricade, Human?"  
  
Wesley held up something that looked like a necklace he picked up at Liberace's estate sale. "The amulet of Ab-Szecia," he said matter-of-factly, as if she should have known that. "Don't worry, I'm not here to cause trouble - I'm from Wolfram and Hart."  
  
A horned demon near the door moved several stools away from Wes.   
  
"I thought you weren't here to cause trouble," Ytoj spat, and Logan thought he saw a nimbus of energy forming around her hands. She had powers? What kind?  
  
"I assure you, I only came to see my friend, then I will take my leave. There's no need to throw a bolt at me."  
  
A bolt? Lightning bolt? Energy bolt? What kind of power did Ytoj's breed have exactly? He didn't know demons could sling energy too … but why the hell not? "Ya mean me?" Logan asked.  
  
Wes looked over at him, and did his best to suppress a sigh of relief. "Yes, in fact I do."  
  
Logan caught Ytoj's bright eyes, and told her, "It's cool."  
  
She looked between them suspiciously, but after a moment, reluctantly nodded. Maybe knowing the Sisters was as good as knowing Bob.  
  
Wes pulled out the chair across from him and sat down, rolling his eyes slightly at the response of Ytoj and putting the amulet down in the center of the table, and the slime demon at the bar who abruptly left, as if Wesley was somehow contagious. "This is a fun place," he said sarcastically.  
  
Logan shrugged. "How'd you get through exactly? Does that thing make you see glamours or something?"  
  
"No, it allows the wearer to pass through them. Although still I almost didn't - it was like pushing through wet concrete. It makes me wonder how you got in here."  
  
"I know the owner," he offered, aware that was both obvious and lame. "What d'ya got for me?  
  
Wesley's gaze was long and suspicious - he wasn't going to let him get away with this. Damn it. "What is your relationship with Bob, exactly?"  
  
He stared at him in disbelief. "I've been bangin' him - what do you think?"  
  
Wes sat back, scowling at his defiance. "We have mystics as part of the security detail at Wolfram and Hart. Last night, they reported three unauthorized vampires in the lobby - Lady Blood and the Sisters - and a "being touched by a powerful force"."   
  
The Englishman stared at him, and he stared back, folding his arms across his chest. "Coulda been Spike," he charged, knowing that wasn't even a possibility.  
  
Wes's scowl deepened to the point where it looked like the lower half of his face might fall off. "What exactly has Bob done to you?"  
  
"He hasn't done anything. It's just that …" Should he tell him? Did it make any difference? "Look, I'm his avatar, okay?"  
  
Wesley's eyes widened to the point where he thought his contacts would fall out onto the table. "What? No -"  
  
"It's not a big deal," he said, irritated at his obvious horror. "It was an accident anyways."  
  
"How is making you an avatar accidental?" Wes was more than horrified - he was starting to get angry, as if he'd hunt Bob down and start wailing on his ass.  
  
Logan hated to be in this position - not just defending Bob, but explaining the absurd. "Look, it's a long story, involving a sorcerer working with a demon god and a body switching spell … or something like that. Look, it's weird and it sounds even worse when you try and explain it, but it wasn't him who did it."  
  
Wes's arched eyebrow said "Oh really?" louder than any words. "So you've been involved in lots of questionable exploits with Bob?"  
  
There was a sort of humoring patronization in his attitude that he really didn't like. "As I said, I've been bangin' him."  
  
He scoffed at the defiance, slapping a manila folder on the table between them. "Logan, this is serious."  
  
"What the fuck is so serious about this?" He snapped, feeling an explosive surge of rage building inside of him. He was trying to steel himself to the fact that he was going to have to kill Jean, and this asshole wanted to chew over old news that meant nothing.  
  
Wesley's look was evenly split between disbelief and anger. "Bob is the Drai'shajan, yes? That means he's a god, a fallen angel like Lucifer -"  
  
"Lucifer wasn't that," he said, before he could stop himself. Well, he'd gone this far, so now to explain it. "He was some kind of messengers for the powers that went nuts. He aligned himself with the Old Ones for … well hell, I can't remember what. Wasn't good."  
  
"Couldn't be." Wes seemed torn between doubt and belief. "So what happened?"  
  
"Bob sent the Old Ones to a hell dimension, and killed Lucifer." Just saying it, it seemed silly beyond belief. But no point in getting embarrassed about it now. "It happened in that alternate dimension, where I decapitated Spike. Uh, the other Spike. However that works."  
  
"You were actually there, when all this happened?"  
  
"What I said, isn't it?" Well, no, technically he hadn't, but it was implied. "Anyways, he wasn't a devil or angel or anything - just one seriously fucked up guy with a knack for picking bad company." That sounded scarily like him, but he decided not to dwell on it. He wondered if he knew what Bob had told him - that the Bible was put together by Belials, and just a big con - but it would be more common knowledge if the Watchers knew it, right? So he decided to just leave that out. "You don't believe everything you read, do ya?"  
  
"Hardly, but -" Wesley glanced around before leaning forward, dropping his voice to a whisper. "Let me tell you something all Watchers learn early on: gods have no place here. A god on earth can only be trouble."  
  
"Why's that?" He wasn't surprised, just curious.  
  
"Because this plane isn't made for them. Some have tried to make a go of it here, but they always fail. This plane … in its way, it's two dimensional to them. They could never be happy here on its own - their usual urge is to alter it into something more to their liking. And what they like is not something Humans would like, assuming they could live through it. They are different beings, with a different agenda, and more power than any of us could possibly imagine. They're dangerous, even if they don't mean to be. They are giants, and we are insects, at least by basic comparison. Even when they don't mean to hurt us - as rare as that is - they usually do."  
  
He wondered where he was going with all of this. Gods were dangerous? Yeah, well, he figured that one out long before Jean drove her fist through his sternum. "Plannin' to kill Bob, Wes?"  
  
He gave him a remarkably dirty look, confirming he had hardened up a bit since Logan had seen him last. "Don't be stupid. It's just that once you're his -"  
  
"I am not his," he protested. "Look, okay, most gods suck mud, but Bob's one of the good guys. Believe it or not. Mostly."  
  
"Would you like to qualify that a bit more?"  
  
"Fuck you."  
  
"I'm just trying to warn you, Logan. Once pulled into his orbit, you are indelibly marked. You are a potential magnet for his followers and foes alike."  
  
He scoffed in dark humor. Talk about a warning coming way too late. But he simply said, "I know, I got that. Was that what you came here to talk about?"  
  
The look in Wes's eyes suggested he was not through with this topic, but he sighed and decided to relent, if only just this once. Maybe the fact that the jukebox was now blasting Tool was a factor. "Not completely, no." He opened the manila folder, and said, "It seems the Vantha are -"  
  
"A death cult, yeah," Logan interrupted. "The Weirds told me last night."  
  
"Did they? Did they tell you that officially, the group stopped existing in 1997?" Wes handed over a sheet of paper that smelled of fax machine toner, and he saw a paper written in Italian, and a translated version of the text stapled to the back. He didn't bother with the translated version. Wesley continued, "It disbanded after the arrest of the leader, Michael Vanson, in Naples."  
  
"For murder?" Logan guessed.  
  
"Tax evasion."  
  
"Isn't that what they got Capone for?"  
  
Wesley shrugged, and pretty much ignored that. "As you can see, all the group's property was confiscated and sold by the government to make up for the lost revenue. The followers, as far as can be determined, simply broke up and drifted off. If they reformed at all, they did it so sub rosa it showed up on no one's radar. You said you encountered them in Tokyo? What were they doing there?"  
  
"Muscling in on Yakuza territory," He said, giving him back the sheet. "They'd set themselves up as gangsters, which is why Yasha and I didn't guess the cult angle."  
  
"Yasha?"  
  
"Lady Blood. It's what she calls herself."  
  
Wesley's blue eyes went back to the wide and startled look. "You know that can't possibly be her real name."  
  
"I know, but my name ain't Wolverine either. What do I care what people call themselves?"  
  
He nodded, accepting that with equanimity. "Who was in this gang? As far as you could tell."  
  
"Demons - the only Humans I met seemed like rent-a-cop types. They were mainly Ressiks and Belials and Berserkers."  
  
"Not them again."  
  
"Yeah, them again. I never did thank Angel for tellin' me you kill them by hitting the back of the neck. I oughta."  
  
"Okay, this is making less and less sense. The majority of the old Vantha cult were Human, and they weren't violent, simply morose."  
  
"According to the Weirds, the followers had the wrong end of the stick."  
  
It seemed to take Wes a minute to get his drift. "Oh, you mean about worshipping Vanth as a death dealer? Yes. Vanth is one of the nicer death gods; she was often called upon by people with loved ones suffering slow deaths. She can't stand to see anything suffer."  
  
"The demon answer to Kervorkian?"  
  
Wes grimaced humorously, and admitted, "Well, that's stretching it, but you could look at it that way, I suppose." He removed another sheet from the folder, and passed it over. "This is her. Did you see anything with her image on it?"  
  
This piece of paper had what looked like the etching of a gargoyle on it; a gargoyle with a serpent's face and the talons of an eagle, a squat body like a muscular toad, and huge wings, spread like a bat's … with an eyeball on the tip of each wing. "Wow, she's butt ugly, isn't she?" He exclaimed, wondering if any god was actually pretty. Bob didn't really count, as the body he wore was just a shell - the real Bob was just nebulous energy. A pretty blue energy, though.  
  
Wesley rolled his shoulders, a half-hearted shrug that seemed to say "I've seen worse". "Death gods aren't known for their beauty."  
  
"Yeah, but they're usually not known for their compassion, are they?" He was just guessing there, but it felt right. "Believe me, if I'd seen anything this ugly, I'd have remembered it. But what sense does this make? Followers of a relatively nice messenger of death being completely violent shitheads?"  
  
Wesley sat back, frowning, just as puzzled as he was. "It doesn't make any sense at all. If they were worshipping Osiris, I could see it - he's an extremely unpleasant death god. But Vanth … " he trailed off, lost in thought, staring at a nothing point over Logan's shoulder.   
  
"Could they be … mistaken?" Logan offered, aware that didn't make a lot of sense. "Could something have shown up, said, "Hey, I'm Vanth, worship me", and made them go for it?"  
  
"No. All they'd have to do is flip open a book and see that they'd been had." He fell silent for a moment, thinking, until a light seemed to dawn in his eyes. "Unless they took the name to be deliberately misleading. Some gods have taboos about their names being spoken aloud. Perhaps they worship another god, but can't actually say who."  
  
Logan was briefly confused - what kinda god can't say his own fucking name? - but he was following his thought. "So they chose the benign name of Vanth, but all the time are malignant."  
  
"Exactly."  
  
"But how long will that fool anyone?"  
  
"I wouldn't think it was intended to fool."  
  
"It's just a blind."  
  
"Yes - meant not only to be confusing to their enemies, but to besmirch a decent death god's name."  
  
"You figure if she found out, she'd be pissed."  
  
"I'd imagine so."  
  
"Is there some way we can tell her?" Logan wondered.  
  
Wes cocked his head to the side, thinking (and possibly trying to block out White Zombie), and then his eyes glittered with malice as a smile crept slowly across his face. "It's worth a shot, isn't it?" He snatched up the gaudy pink and gold pendant from the table, and shoved the file over towards him before getting up. "I'll go back to Wolfram and Hart, talk to the soothsayers about getting in touch with Vanth. In the meantime, I suggest you lay low, stay out of sight. This could be some black magic cult, and without Bob to protect you directly, you could be attacked from almost any angle." He then paused, and asked, "Would you like to come back to Wolfram and Hart with me? We have sorcerers on staff who could probably protect you from any incursions."  
  
He shook his head. "Thanks, but I ain't got a great association with that building. 'Sides, I gotta touch base with the Sisters. But maybe I'll drop by later."  
  
"I promise you won't be greeted by armed guards this time."  
  
He just shrugged, mock casual. "Doesn't matter to me. Feels like home."  
  
Wes smiled faintly, and said, "I'll call you as soon as I find out whether we can make contact or not."  
  
"Sure. Careful walkin' the street with a big jewel like that."  
  
That made the Englishman give him a grin that was ironic as it was evil. "Oh, I'd like to see someone try and take it from me. That ought to be fun." He then sobered up with frightening rapidity. "You know where we are, and you know that Bob …" He didn't finish that sentence, and Logan figured he must have guessed it was best not to. "Take care."  
  
He just nodded, and to the great relief of everyone else in the bar, Wesley left. Logan knew this information about the Vantha should have been disturbing, but it wasn't. Not in comparison to what he was steeling himself to do.  
  
Maybe everything paled in comparison to the death of a loved one, even if it was your own potential death you were looking at. And perhaps especially if you were planning their murder in the first place.  
  
Logan hoped Wes did get in contact with Vanth - he was suffering too. Just not in the usual way of her victims. Still, he'd take whatever release he could get. 


	9. Part 9

14  
  
The owner of the "Vampire Arms" had obviously thought of everything, as they were right next to a handy sewer access, leading all over L.A. from beneath the pavement. That's how Yasha came to join him at the Way Station, less than hour after Wes had left, even though the sun hadn't set yet.  
  
He gave her the file and told her what he and Wes had discussed. She nodded and agreed with their basic supposition, and also agreed that perhaps he should take temporary shelter at Wolfram and Hart. As she gathered up the faxes and print outs, placing them neatly inside the folder, she asked a question he'd been waiting for. "Why did you leave without me?" She said. "You could have at least woken me up and told me you were going out."  
  
"I didn't wanna disturb you." A partial truth - he just wasn't up to speaking to anyone before he left.  
  
She stared at him, and he knew she was seeing right through him. "Are you okay?"  
  
"Yeah," he lied. "Just couldn't sleep." At least that part was true.  
  
Her dark eyes narrowed, brows lowering, and he knew she wasn't completely buying it. "You can trust me, you know."  
  
"I know. I just … you know how it is with me and nightmares. I just needed to get out for a while, clear my head. I didn't want any company. Besides, it was on the sunny side out there."  
  
She accepted that with a nod, but as she laced her hands around her cup of heated blood (goat - which brought up frightening memories of Urp), she said, "You remind me of me sometimes - full of secrets."  
  
He knew that wasn't a compliment or a complaint, just a statement, but it still seemed curiously close to the bone.  
  
He knew Yasha could kill Jean, no problem, but Camaxtli would never let a vampire get that close. Too bad; it would take some of the guilt off if he could farm it out to someone else. But that was no fair to Yasha, and he knew it.  
  
Here Wes had tried to warn him that being with a god was dangerous. Didn't he realize just being with him was dangerous as well? Sometimes people just ended up where they were supposed to be.  
  
It wasn't long before the Sisters joined them as well, before sundown, smelling only faintly of the sewer. They had gotten sidetracked in their search for Urp by picking up "mucho bad mojo" in Glendale. That turned out to be an "amateur" black magician and a vortex demon "goofing off". Supposedly they "handled it", but no one asked how, as who wanted to know and possibly be an accessory after the fact?  
  
They had assigned Lissha - the Frenik, it seemed - to try and find Urp, and were waiting to hear back from her. Well, the lingering sun wouldn't harm a Frenik. So that meant they had to play a waiting game, which was always fun with the Sisters.  
  
Yasha filled them in on everything, and the idea of him taking shelter at Wolfram and Hart made them smile in that creepy way of theirs. "Wouldn't -"  
  
"-that-"  
  
"-be funny," they agreed.  
  
"But Angel -"  
  
"-will take good-"  
  
"-care of you."  
  
He scowled at them, sure this was them displaying a sense of humor. It was hardly welcome right now. "So what's the deal? Do you hate him or what?" Well, Yasha hated the guy who turned her, but he supposed that wasn't always the norm.   
  
"Angel?"  
  
"No-"  
  
"-why would-"  
  
"-we hate-"  
  
"-him? He made-"  
  
"-us what we-"  
  
"-are today."  
  
See, that was a very good reason to hate him. But the Sisters were so perverse, it would have to be the exact opposite.   
  
After a while, their cell phone rang ( there was no way in hell their ring tone was "Sex Type Thing", was it? That's kind of what it sounded like … ), and while one answered, the other leaned in, so they appeared to be connected at the ear. "Yes?" One said.  
  
Logan could hear the burr of conversation, but didn't pay that much attention. Their half of the conversation told him enough. "Where -"  
  
"-is-"  
  
"-he?" A pause, then, "Yes-"  
  
"-please."  
  
They held out the phone so they were looking at it, and Logan only belatedly realized it was one of those complicated digital phones with photo capability. From the play of light on their bizarrely innocent looking faces, an image was indeed loading up.   
  
Their expression never changed, but they did say a slightly disappointed, "Oh-"  
  
"-dear."  
  
"What's happened?" Yasha asked warily.  
  
The Sisters turned the phone towards them, so they could see for themselves. It wasn't a big image, but clear enough - the head of an extremely warty looking demon with its head stuck on a scarecrow's body, ichor yellow blood staining the front of the burlap bag shirt like mustard, flies and wasps blocking much of it, making it look like a grotesque surrealistic image, the orange sky in the background as pretty as a painting. "These people have a thing for decapitation, don't they?" Yasha noted.  
  
"It-"  
  
"-sends-"  
  
"-a strong-"  
  
"-message."  
  
"So does a retraining order," Logan interjected. "But they haven't hit us with one of those, have they?" He sighed, and scrubbed a hand through his hair. "So should we check out Napa Valley?"  
  
"That-"  
  
"-would-"  
  
"-be logical," the Weirds agreed.  
  
"Right. I gotta hit then head, and then we can hit the sewers," he said, getting up. There was an irony there, but he had no desire to pursue it.  
  
The men's room of the Way Station was always oddly clean, which never failed to surprise him. Maybe Bob had put a spell on this place, saving it from drunks and demons who oozed excessively.   
  
He had been alone in the room, but when he was zipping up, he heard a strange noise behind him. It almost wasn't a noise, more a sense of pressure - like a brief bubble of null space had been popped - and he turned around in time to see that someone was now in the stall parallel the urinal he had been using. A teleported? Rags?  
  
But he barely had time to think about it, as he heard them say something before the door swung open -   
  
- and Logan found himself rooted to the spot. He couldn't move, couldn't speak, could barely breathe as the stall door swung aside, and a scaly demon with bright, slit pupiled eyes the color of pond scum, came out. "Hello, avatar," it said, in a raspy voice that sounded almost painful. "Do you know what a hard man you are to find? I hope you're worth it."  
  
He couldn't do anything. He struggled to move, to break the invisible bonds holding him fast, but he was perfectly helpless - and lizard boy knew it. His eyes glittered with unholy glee as he said something in that incomprehensible tongue, and that bubble of negative space seemed to open up around them again.   
  
So the Vantha had found him. He wondered if he'd find out who they really worshipped before they killed him.  
  
15  
  
Yasha was studying her glass of goat blood, wondering why it tasted so damn bad (maybe a little vodka would help), and what Logan was hiding from her.  
  
There was something even more haunted behind his eyes than usual, something that made his jaw look tense enough to snap. He also smelled faintly of anger and fear, and a special scent she categorized as self-loathing. If he did have a nightmare like he claimed, it wasn't like his usual ones.  
  
But one of the things she liked about him was he didn't talk a lot. After a hundred years of hearing men talk about themselves, it was nice she'd finally met one who'd rather just brood and sulk by himself. Of course, that had a special annoyance all its own, but at least it was different. She'd sworn off men for ten years for a damn good reason.  
  
Having the Weirds here didn't help. They more than lived up to their name - could there have been creepier little girls? They gave identical, odd eyed twins a bad name. Or a good name, if you were inclined that way.  
  
"Logan-"  
  
"-is-"  
  
"-troubled," they volunteered.  
  
She looked between them, perfectly deadpan. "He's always troubled."  
  
"More-"  
  
"-than-"  
  
"-usual."  
  
Maybe it was pique, but she wasn't ready to admit that she had been thinking the same thing. "How can you tell?"  
  
They gave her those unnerving stereo grins that never came anywhere near their unusually bright and hollow eyes. They were like silver dollars on a corpse, substituting for real eyes in their unfortunate absence. "You-"  
  
"-know-"  
  
"-what consumes-"  
  
"-him. You-"  
  
"-tell us."  
  
She scowl at them, intensely disliking their mocking patronization. They knew damn well what bothered him; they were just playing a game. In fact, they might have known more about Logan than she did. She had a feeling there was more to he told her - the "experimentation", the people that cut him open - but of course he wasn't saying. The man of one thousand secrets - and if her guess was right, most of them were painful.  
  
It was then she felt the strangest shiver down the back of her neck. What the hell was that?  
  
The Sisters looked at each other, in such a way that they looked briefly sentient. "Uh-"  
  
"-oh."  
  
"You know what that was?" A stupid question, because these freaky little bitches seemed to know everything that they shouldn't.  
  
"Black-"  
  
"-magic-"  
  
"-big usage."  
  
They all looked at each other for a split second, and then, as if on cue, they all exclaimed, "Logan!"  
  
They burst up out of their chairs at the same time, but it was Yasha who made it to the men's room door first and slammed it open so hard she almost busted it.  
  
It was empty. Gleaming porcelain urinals and strangely unmarked green tiles greeted them, as did metal stall doors painted the unfortunate color of old blood. In fact, it was so clean, it could have been a woman's bathroom. How did Bob keep it so sparkly with men and demons around? She'd never heard of enchanted toilets, but why the hell not?  
  
But there was a whiff of something in the air, something she never expected to smell in a men's bathroom. "Is that … burned mandrake root?" Odd air freshener choice.  
  
The Sisters nodded in agreement. "He-"  
  
"-was-"  
  
"-teleported out."  
  
"No shit. Where?" But that question simply hung in the air. Shit! All because of him and his weak bladder, they got him. She looked sharply over her shoulder, and asked, "Can you trace a teleport?"  
  
They seemed puzzled she would even ask. "No."  
  
Napa Valley was huge. Even if they limited things to the general area that Urp was searching, it would take them a long time to track these people down. And that was assuming they took Logan there - after the head on the stick message, she was willing to bet they had shifted the point of operation. They had only one chance here - someone who could trace teleportation spells. "Call his friend," she demanded of them.  
  
The way they both cocked their heads at her, they looked like a pair of humanoid lovebirds. "Which-"  
  
"-one?"  
  
"The Wolfram and Hart people, Wesley," she explained, exasperated. "Their a big cesspool of evil; surely they can trace a teleportation spell."  
  
"It's-"  
  
"-worth-"  
  
"-a shot," they agreed, as one of them pulled the cell phone out of the other one's pocket. She shook her head and looked away, back inside the men's room. Weirdoes.  
  
She knew Angel didn't like her, and she didn't much care from him. Did mousse boy really think he was such hot shit? She didn't care how old he was, or how bad Angelus supposedly had been - she had taken on the entirety of the Templars! She could killed his pale, ensouled ass from one end of his lobby to the other. In fact, the cocky ones were usually the easiest to take, simply because they thought they were so good they fucked up big time.   
  
But he was Logan's friend - somehow, in some way. And she wouldn't kick his ass unless he started something. Hopefully he was smart enough not to do that, but she supposed they were all going to find out.  
  
Because she doubted Wesley would be coming alone.   
  
***  
  
It was like fighting against a black tide of heavy water.  
  
He kept going for consciousness, and kept being pulled down by an undertow. At best he heard fragments here and there, language in another time, filtered down through a rip in space. Random words that made no sense, and his mind was too foggy to put them together. It was a dark, cold limbo trying to press him down.   
  
What did he know? He knew something was keeping him from full consciousness, something was keeping him from opening his eyes and feeling his body as anything but a prison of insensate meat. He didn't know magic could do that. But why the hell not?  
  
Fighting against it was pointless. It was an implacable, solid wall of darkness, and he didn't have the ability to fight against it. It was like sliding against a glass wall that, for some reason, his claws couldn't penetrate.  
  
He wondered what they were going to do with him. If they were planning to cut off his head, he wished them luck - cutting through adamantium neck bones was going to be a trick.  
  
But he bet the attempt would hurt like a bitch.  
  
16  
  
The very fact that there was a knock on the door at all raised alarm bells in his mind.  
  
Sizic knew handling a guy like that could bring on some serious repercussions … but would trouble actually bother to knock?   
  
"Pizza delivery," the clueless guy called from beyond the door, and Sizic let out a sigh of relief, mixed with frustration.   
  
"Mrgret, did you order a pizza?" How idiotic - ordering a pizza at the super-secret hideout. He was like the stupid villain in every single spy movie. Just because he was a constantly hungry glutton demon was no fucking excuse.  
  
As long as this thing worked out, he'd get all the pizza - and Humans - he could eat. Couldn't he just wait a couple of hours?  
  
Sizic's hand was on the door knob when Mrgret, his mouth sounding full of food (typical) called out, "I didn't order a pizza."  
  
The door opened hard, smashing into Sizic's face with the force of a battering ram, and he thought he heard wood cracking … or at least he hoped it was wood. "I can't believe anyone falls for that," said the big man, looming in the now open doorway. "Maybe I should have said candy gram."  
  
The sky beyond the man's shoulder was a deep, corrosion blue - not quite night, but the sun was definitely gone for the evening. Which explained why this guy looked Human, but definitely didn't smell that way. Sizic got back to his feet shakily, wiping blood from his now broken nose, and snapped, "What the fuck do you want, vampire?" What kind of idiot was he to pick this place to do a home invasion? There weren't even any Humans here.  
  
"What do I want?" He repeated, as if it was the stupidest question he ever heard. "Logan. Where is he?"  
  
There were voices behind him, and a weird Human came in, chanting something in … Latvian? He shouldered past the big vampire, and that was when Sizic noticed they were both wearing similar pendants around their necks. They were age tarnished skeleton keys, quite literally - the head of the keys were shaped like skulls.  
  
The Human stepped around him, and finished speaking, folding up the piece of paper he had been reading from and sticking it in his pocket. "There. If she doesn't respond to that, there's nothing else we can do." For some reason, he was British. Watcher? No, couldn't be - not working with a vampire. Besides, weren't most of the British ones dead?  
  
Sizic looked between them. "Who the fuck are you people? Scientologists?"  
  
The vampire looked at him, stern and unamused. "I've already said - we're Logan's friends. And if you want to save yourself further misery, you'd better cough him up. Now."  
  
"Who the fuck is Logan?" He demanded, wondering where the hell his back up was. Surely those assholes watching t.v. in the back had heard all of this.   
  
The vampire crossed his arms over his chest, and glared at him like he just interrupted a virgin kill. "I'm from Wolfram and Hart, jackass - we know what you did."  
  
Wolfram and Hart? The very name was confusing. Weren't they evil? What interest could they have in an avatar? Unless they wanted him for themselves. Oh shit. "We didn't know we were stepping on your territory," he said apologetically, then kicked out, hitting the vampire square in the knee and sending him falling on his ass.  
  
As he spun to snap the neck of the Human, something slammed into his face, sending him stumbling back into the wall, spitting out broken teeth. Sizic looked to see the Human was suddenly holding a metal, telescoping baton in his right hand - where the fuck had he pulled that from? Talk about dirty fucking pool. He must have been a Watcher or something. Poncy bastards.  
  
A picture had fallen and broken on the floor by his feet, and a quick glance revealed it was a wooden picture frame. Cool beans. He could give a fuck about the Human, no matter his "training" or the weapons he carried - the vampire was the threat, and needed to be taken out immediately. He used his heel to crush the remainder of the frame, and grabbed a nice stake sized piece, as the vampire sprung up to his feet, snarling, in full, ugly vamp face. "You shouldn't have done that."  
  
"Yes he should have," a voice said, to his immediate left. Sizic turned his head so fast he almost snapped his own neck. It was a pale, scrawny British man with peroxide blond hair and a long black coat, whom he had never seen before in his life. But he was grinning at him like an old friend. "C'mon, do it again. I love seeing him get his ass kicked."  
  
Sizic looked between this odd triptych, wondering if someone had slipped him some acid. "Who the fuck are you people?" Did this make any sense?  
  
The guy beside him scoffed. "God - as dumb as a doorstop. You from Sunnydale, by any chance?"  
  
Sizic spun on his heels, fist first, and caught the blond guy right in the face … except he didn't. His fist went straight through him, and slammed into the wall full force. He screamed as his knuckles snapped like plywood against the drywall, which he managed to punch most of the way through. Fuck - a ghost. Why didn't he smell like a ghost? And who the hell brought a ghost anywhere anyways?  
  
The ghost quickly stepped away, but continued to point and snicker. "Yeah, you gotta be from Sunnyhell. Unless you're a special needs demon or something."  
  
There were suddenly screams and dull thuds - the sounds of a quick and brutal fight - coming from the back rooms, and that explained why his back up just wasn't materializing. As he looked towards the noises, rubbing his aching hand, he wondered what happened to the easy gig.  
  
Oh, there'd better be hazard pay for this.  
  
***  
  
As if having his legs taken out from under him by Renat demon wasn't bad enough, of course Spike had to pop in just then. Angel sometimes wondered if he wasn't cursed with anything so much as the world's worst luck.  
  
At least the Renat was pretty much out as a viable threat. He was large for the type; about six five and two hundred pounds of muscle beneath skin as gray and gnarled as tree bark, and eyes as bloated and black as storm clouds. Blood the color of mud was trickling from his nose and distended jaw, courtesy of meeting the door and Wesley's baton rather violently. His blood and frustration smelled like burned hair, and it was suck a noxious scent it almost blocked out the smell of Logan's blood on him.  
  
Why hadn't Wesley forced him to come back with him? Not that he blamed him - Logan was such a pigheaded bastard. If you wanted to drag him somewhere he didn't want to go, you needed a wrecking ball, two tons of heavy duty chains, and a reinforced tank - and that still might not be enough. Would it have killed him to be reasonable for once?  
  
Actually, it may have killed him not being reasonable, but he wasn't going to count on that until he found a body. He was too stubborn to die anyways.  
  
Where the fuck was Bob? He should have been around to protect him. But he couldn't use any of the company resources to find him. As it turned out, Bob was the sole occupant of the "Untouchable" list: no one from the company was supposed to approach him ever, or even get within one block of the Way Station under the penalty of mind wiping. Even when he asked the spell casters to use a simple location spell to track him down, they refused, on the grounds he could trace the spell back to them. No amount of threatening persuaded them in the least, as the bottom line was they were more afraid of Bob than him. Well, if he was a god he supposed he could see their point, but why hadn't the bastard ever mentioned it to them? They could have used his help several times.  
  
Angel had to honest with himself, though - would he have really gone to Bob? He still didn't trust him, and frankly being a god just made the trust issue worse. How could you ever trust a being with that much power? Also, Bob was a irredeemable smart ass.  
  
"I can smell his blood on you," Angel snarled. "Start talking, or I start ripping out chunks."  
  
"Fuck you," the Renat replied, spitting muddy blood on the floor. It looked like the upper half of his body was starting to curl around his injured hand. Angel was sorry Spike couldn't have felt that punch; not only would it have broken his nose, but it may have knocked him out (if they were lucky).  
  
Spike scoffed, but glancing at him, he saw Spike was pointing at him. "What's with the librarian pimp wear jewelry? Or is this some kinda lame ass Cali fad?"   
  
He didn't even need to look down to know what he was pointing at. "It's a symbol of Vanth; it identifies us as friends." Spike was mercifully gone while the sorcerers figured out a way to "maybe" contact Vanth (there were no sure things with gods - which his brief association with Bob should have taught him), and gave them the enchanted "keys" to wear, on the off chance they were successful in summoning her. Vanth's symbols were snakes, torches, and keys, but even Wesley didn't know why.  
  
The Renat glanced up guiltily, aware for the first time they knew of his fake faith.   
  
"Who the fuck is Vanth?" Spike asked, shaking his head dismissively.  
  
A Ressik suddenly fled into the front room, uninjured but reeking of someone else's blood, stinking of anger and fear. Since Spike's back was the first opponent he saw, he dove right toward him in a spine shattering tackle.  
  
But, again, just like the Renat, he plunged violently through Spike, and met the hardwood floor with a sickening crunch.  
  
Spike turned, unaware he'd been the focus of violence until it was all over, and looked down at his groaning opponent. "Wanker," he scoffed, miming a kick to his head. "What the fuck is this place? A rehab for demons who've had their brains sucked out their ears? When I was evil, I had clothing smarter than you sorry sacks of shit." He walked away, shaking his head in disgust. "Pathetic."  
  
But the Ressik popped back up, growling in shame turned to rage, his yellow, grapefruit sized glowing with anger. "You, vampire, you'll be the first to die. We -" He sucked in a hard breath, making a squeaking noise at the end, and black blood bubbled out his mouth as he weakly tried to reach his back. He wavered for a moment, then collapsed to the floor, dead before he met it again.  
  
Lady Blood - Yasha, according to Wes - strode into the room purposefully, her black leather suit making her look bizarrely (and even more oddly, attractively) like the undead Chinese version of Emma Peel. In the Ressik's cream colored (now blackening) shirt, it was difficult to see where her tiny copper throwing knife - hardly bigger than one of those elementary school pink block erasers - was sticking out from between his fifth and sixth vertebrae. She gave them all a cursory glance - so cool he almost felt the breeze off of it - as she reported neutrally, "The place back there reeks of his blood, but there isn't a piece of him to be found." With a single swift and delicate move, she plucked the knife out of the Ressik's back and spun on the Renat, plunging the knife right into the wall beside his head.  
  
Or so they thought.  
  
But then the mud started trickling down the wall, and he started breathing in a funny way, giving it a syllable - han, han - and he was starting to stink of panic and pain. She had driven the knife through his ear, nailing it to the wall … and she still had the palm of her hand pressing down on it. She got right into his face, sinister casual, and said, "Where's the basement?"  
  
The Renat gaped fish mouthed for a moment, and when he finally could speak, it was with that mystery syllable peppering his speech. "We - han - don't have - han - a base-han-ment."  
  
"Yes you do," she insisted coolly. "All you wannabe evil fucks have basements. Now tell me where it is, or I take your ear." She was putting delicate pressure on the knife, letting it dig in deeper, in slow and steady increments. Even Spike had to wince; that had to hurt.  
  
It must have, or maybe the Renat just didn't like the predatory rage in her eyes (a specialty of vampires), because he broke with astonishing swiftness. "Han-under the - han - stereo sys-han-tem there's a -han- trap door - han."  
  
"Good." She yanked the knife out with more violence than was necessary, and he crumpled to the wall, instantly cupping his bloody, shredded ear. "If you're lying, I'm coming back to start on your testicles."  
  
All the men in the room winced at that, but she stormed off so quickly she didn't notice. She was playing the concerned friend - girlfriend, whatever - quite well, but Angel didn't know if he dare trust it. She was still a vampire, and still clearly very vicious and dangerous. But it was easy to see what Logan saw in her, especially in that black leather outfit.   
  
"Wow, she's an intense bitch, ain't she?" Spike noted. After a pause, he added, "I think I'm in love."  
  
"Where is he?" Angel demanded of the mewling Renat. He must have been very attached to that ear. "What have you done with him?"  
  
He gasped, and spat out a dirty clot of blood before speaking. He lost the extra syllable. "It's too late, bloodsucker. It's begun."  
  
"What's begun?"  
  
He scoffed very weakly, spattering the floor with more of his blood. Was that a weak spot on Renat physiology? It suddenly occurred to Angel that Yasha might have been pressing the knife into a vital nerve cluster. "Something far beyond you. When he returns, you'll be the first to die. The old life will be scoured away."  
  
"What?"  
  
"What the fuck's he on about?" Spike asked, sounding annoyed.  
  
"Shut up!" He snapped, trying to figure this out in his head. This was the Vantha, right? So the return couldn't be referring to Logan … could it? No, that made no sense. But what the hell was all that wanting to hunt him down and kill him? Angel could have smacked himself in the head when he suddenly realized, "Your intention never was to kill him, was it? This is some kind of trap. You wanted him to look for you." Someone had played the reverse psychology angle on Logan, aware that his first instinct was not to run from a threat, but attack it face on.  
  
The Renat snickered, and grinned at him coldly, its erose gray teeth now brown with blood. "Got no fucking reason to tell you anything, vamp. Just sit tight. You'll find out soon enough."  
  
He glared at him, wondering if ripping the rest of his fucking earlobe off would make him talkative, but then he saw the shadows clustering around the open door between the front room and the back, and realized he didn't have to do a damn thing. He'd talk. He'd talk or be more sorry than any living thing on this planet. "Fine. We're done here. Girls, he's all yours."  
  
The Renat turned his head slowly, and seemed to freeze as he laid eyes on Belinda and Beatrice - more commonly known as the Weird Sisters - sauntering into the room, blissfully empty and malevolent smiles on their faces. "Oh-"  
  
"-boy," they said, leering at the Renat.  
  
He must have heard of them, and must have realized he was now in some seriously deep shit; the reek of his fear had just spiked tenfold. "Y-you can't leave me to them," he said, voice cracking slightly in panic.   
  
Angel made a show of turning his back on him, morphing out of game face. "Can, will, have," he replied. "Wes, let's go."  
  
Wesley, playing along, started moving towards the door. Spike must have panicked at the sight of the Sisters himself, because suddenly he was standing outside, well beyond the Sisters' notice or reach. "You mean that's it? I thought you wanted to save chops, although I have no idea why. He owe you money?"  
  
Angel glanced back in time to see the Sisters had each taken one of the Renat's arms, and before he could react in any meaningful way, they spun underneath them, as if dancing - and dislocated his arms cleanly from their shoulders with a sickening pop, like firecrackers going off in the empty parlor.  
  
He made a wheezing, high pitched noise of pain, dropping to his knees, as the Sisters kept hold of his arms. Then they each planted one boot on the side of his face, and said to each other, "Make-"  
  
"-a-"  
  
"-wish."  
  
"Holy fuck," Spike gasped. "They're gonna rip his arms off. Can I just watch? I'll join you at the car."  
  
That was it for the Renat - he was done with resisting. Apparently he was quite attached to his limbs as well. "He's not here!" He screamed. "We only collected him, took some of his blood as temporary payment! They took him after that - we don't have him anymore!"  
  
"Who took him?" he demanded, turning back towards him. He held up his hand to stay the Sisters, but he had no guarantee it would - the Sisters were inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable. It was why he knew, in the back of his mind, he should kill them, but he never quite figured out how one went about doing that. Angelus had done many evil things, but the Sisters were probably one of the most evil - and they were evil, in theory, even greater than him. But he had to admit, when they were all working on the same side, they made terrific weapons of persuasion. "Why?"  
  
"They need his blood," the Renat gasped. The Sisters hadn't let go of him, but they hadn't ripped his arms off yet. That must have been a plus for him. "His blood is special."  
  
Angel knew that personally, but he still wasn't following any of this. The Vantha - whoever they were - coveted Logan's healing factor? That made no sense - they were demons. They generally had one of their own. "Who needs it?"  
  
The Renat gulped air, and wheezed, "I can't … I can't say …"  
  
"Belinda, take the left," he said. "Beatrice, wait."  
  
"No!" The demon squeaked, the smell of his terror almost revolting now. "They-"  
  
He never got a chance to finish. Angel felt the air seem to shrink in on itself before it tore apart with a scream more felt than heard, and a bright white light flooded the room, blinding them all. There was the sound of flapping leathery wings, the air churned up by them as brisk as a gale, and a smell like heat and feathers, dry snake scales and fur, filled the room.  
  
Oh, wonderful. Vanth had just graced them all with her illustrious, fatal presence. What fabulous timing. 


	10. Part 10

"Vanth," Angel shouted, not sure she even spoke the language. "We need information from him! Don't take him ye-"  
  
But there was a high pitched scream, the whine of an earth boring drill magnified ten thousand times, and hit him like a brick wall. He screamed and dropped to his knees, grabbing his head as the sound seemed to pierce his skull like a sword. The sound reverberated through his brain like shrapnel, tearing through soft tissue like fluff, and he wondered if the keys had failed.  
  
Then it was over. The sound and light retreated suddenly and at once, as if a door had been slammed shut, and he opened his eyes, surprised to find he was still alive. (Okay, he wasn't - in a manner of speaking alive.)  
  
The keys did work - Wesley was still alive, as were the Sisters (again, in a manner of speaking), although the Renat they continued to hold was slumped down towards the floor, stone dead. Spike, who as ghost needed no protection from Vanth (damn), blinked in an exaggerated fashion, and exclaimed, "What the fuck was that?!"  
  
The Sisters let go of the Renat's arms, and he collapsed completely to the floor. "Well-"  
  
"-that's-"  
  
"-that."  
  
Angel stood up, trying to pretend he'd never been on the floor at all, and threw up his hands in disgust. "Now we'll never know who took him or why." He didn't need to search the house to know everyone within its walls was dead - he could smell it.   
  
That was one of the more puzzling things about the Bible - there were many, of course, but the most curious was the idea that any god unhappy with people would shower them with toads or locusts or some such crap. That would only occur if the gods were bored; otherwise, you cheese them off, you're one dead motherfucker. No plague of boils for you, just pushing up daisies.  
  
"I'm not so sure about that," Yasha said, coming into the front room. A wisp of a spider web lingered in her hair like the final strand of a rotted wedding veil, but that was probably all she found in the basement - unless they had torture apparatus too. "I heard him screaming. He said they wanted his blood?"  
  
"Which makes no sense," Angel replied, a sort of yes. "Even vampires wouldn't have much use for his blood. Beyond drinking it."  
  
"You're thinking of him only in the sense of being a mutant," she countered coolly, as if this was an abstract intellectual debate. "He's also an avatar."  
  
Silence descending was supposed to be gentle, a gap of noise. Oddly enough, it now felt like a heavy weight slamming down on all of them.   
  
"Of course," Wesley gasped, finally breaking the choking silence. "As an avatar, his blood is a commodity - that's why they took some."  
  
"Avatar?" Spike scoffed. "Who? Chops? Oh please, who could he be the avatar for - Tony Orlando?"  
  
Everyone ignored him, if they weren't trying to puzzle out his meaning. Since when was Tony Orlando a god?  
  
"This does nothing to narrow the suspects," Wesley said, happily ignoring Spike. "Avatar blood is powerful, and usually stands in for god blood, which is as rare as an attractive slime demon. But considering its power, it can only be used in rituals calling for something drastic or cataclysmic."  
  
"We have to find Bob," Angel insisted. "He can find his own avatar, and he can fucking protect him, which he should've been doing all along."  
  
Yasha scoffed. "Oh yes, Logan is going to accept being watched and coddled all the time."  
  
He glared at her, but he knew she had a point. Of course he'd balk at that; he had a hard time coping with a simple team dynamic.   
  
"If-"  
  
"-you-"  
  
"-think Logan's-"  
  
"-stubborn, try -"  
  
"-and find a-"  
  
"-god who doesn't-"  
  
"-want to be found," the Sisters chimed in, brushing Renat scales off their hands (in tandem, of course).  
  
It was then Angel realized that the Sisters must have known Bob was a god all along - but did they share that information? No, not at all, they just sided with the power that could conceivably kill them with a word. Angelus's "girls" were nothing if not bright. It may have seemed like they were two people sharing a single brain, but really they were two brains merged into one, giving them an insight superior to a puny being with a single, normal sized brain. "You have no idea where he is?"  
  
"If-"  
  
"-he-"  
  
"-wanted to-"  
  
"-be found-"  
  
"-it would be-"  
  
"-easy to do."  
  
"So we're back to square one, finding out where they took Logan," Angel sighed in frustration, running a hand nervously through his hair. "Are you sure we can't run a locator spell?"  
  
Wesley shrugged helplessly. "We could, but if he's shrouded in black magic, it will take time."  
  
"Time he doesn't have."  
  
Wes grimaced. "I imagine."  
  
"So, what, they're going to use his blood to bring up yet another big bad?" Spike interjected, sounding bored. He actually started searching his pockets for cigarettes, and then it must have dawned on him that the dead didn't smoke. Well, not if they were ghosts. "So? We stick a holy fork in it, it's done, we go waste even more of our time filing paternity suits against cluster demons." He then scoffed. "Well, you idiots will. Me, I got better things to do."  
  
"Then why don't you ever leave me alone?" Angel pointed out, somewhat peevishly.  
  
Spike gave him a hard, teeth baring grin. " 'Cause I like buggin' the shit out of you."  
  
Well, at least he was honest.  
  
"If it were only that simple," Wesley interjected, getting them back on track. "Avatar blood wouldn't be used for a standard raising. It would have to be something … big. Something needing a lot of power to breech the barrier between here and wherever it is."  
  
"Something a lot more hard than your bargain basement Hell god," Yasha agreed.  
  
"That's-"  
  
"-it," the Sisters suddenly said.  
  
They all stared at them. "What's it?" Angel asked. "Hell god?"  
  
"How-"  
  
"-do-"  
  
"-you birth-"  
  
"-a god-"  
  
"-but with the-"  
  
"-blood of another?"  
  
"Are you saying they'll use him to bring a god back?" Angel then looked to Wes, trusting his answer more.  
  
Wesley stared back at him starkly, eyes suddenly hollow with terrible knowledge. "That's more than possible. And a god who requires blood to return -"  
  
"-isn't a friendly one," Yasha finished for him. Angel wondered how she knew that, but now was not the time to wonder where Lady Blood acquired her knowledge of the arcane - after all, hadn't she wiped out the Templars? She probably peeked at a record or two.  
  
"It's begun," Wes said quietly, repeating what the Renat had told them. But Wesley said it in a breathless whisper, understanding now the true threat behind those words. "We're already too late, Angel. Logan must have been the last part of the plan. They've already started the ceremony."  
  
"Shit," the Sisters said in unison.  
  
That summed it up nicely.   
  
Where the fuck was Bob when they needed him?  
  
17  
  
Duncan shifted in his chair for what seemed to be the tenth time in as many seconds, so impatient and uncomfortable he was almost vibrating with it. Niemi was slumped comfortably in her chair, looking barely awake, as casual as Duncan was intense. But then again, she was always that way; when you knew you were the strongest person in the building - any building, ever - it probably gave you lots of confidence.   
  
He eyed Duncan with some amusement, and asked, "Was that triple espresso wise?"  
  
Duncan, also known as Duncan Langois, also known as code name Ballistic, scowled at him, but quickly looked away. Even though he'd slacked off on his usual weight training routine, and stopped frosting his hair (why had he ever done that?), he was still a big, broad shouldered man, just now with a slender body that didn't quite match his beefy, diamond shaped face. He was not the most attractive man in the world, but he was by no means homely. But ever since Montana, he seemed depressed, cut down a peg, which was devastating for a narcissist such as Duncan. "That was supposed to be the ploy to get Wolverine's attention - why the fuck was he there?"  
  
Ah, the second ego blow - being handled so easily by Wolverine and Cyclops. But that wasn't all, was it? No; no matter how well he was paying him, Duncan had been looking forward to the money, and to the esteem he'd lost at Shadowcaster. No matter that there was no way he had a chance against Pretty Boy (the only available name for Wolverine's reality warping friend - the intelligence profile's only description of him was "Handsome, Australian, unnaturally blue eyes" - that was it. Nothing else could be confirmed or verified) - no narcissist believed themselves to be vulnerable to anyone, even if it was to the most potentially Alpha mutant in existence. He also felt Cyclops was a one trick pony (true - but what a trick), and was additionally humiliated by being unable to keep it up - so to speak - longer than him. And again, they lost all that easy money.  
  
But they would have been completely fucked if he hadn't sent Afterthought as a back up. Watching with the rest of the crowd, instructed not to aid in any way, simply help extract them if necessary, she imposed anxiety on one of the rookie cops, making him fire a barrage of tear gas that aided their escape, and helped keep Logan from pursuit. He trusted Niemi not to give the game away, but if Wolverine got the better of Duncan, he didn't trust him not to say something importune, if only to lord something over Wolverine.  
  
He was forced to shake his head. "Unknown. But at least we confirmed he's back with Xavier's people."  
  
"Was," Niemi needlessly corrected. She'd never settled on a code name she liked - there really weren't a lot of super strong women outside freak shows, and the modern day equivalent of freak shows, Ms. Olympia contests. Niemi Guerra didn't even look strong; she was a flat chested string bean, who only needed horn rimmed glasses and Spock ears to complete her slightly nebbish-y appearance. You'd never think she could pick up an SUV as easily as a Styrofoam cup.  
  
She was a relatively recent recruit to the program, and not typical by any means. She was from a good, upper class home, private schooled, and her parents - both doctors - made sure she wasn't discriminated against because she was a mutant. It was a shame that she was a sociopath by nature. No amount of money or schooling could give empathy to a person who simply was born without it. That proved it happened in any family, no matter how good.   
  
"He'll be back," he said confidently, sinking back into his plush desk chair, stretching his legs out under the desk. "We'll give him a week, and if there's no contact by then, will make him come back."  
  
Duncan cocked his head to the side, gazing at him like a parrot. He was almost as smart as one too. "Hit the mansion? Grab a kid?"  
  
"Kill someone?" Niemi contributed. She said it with the slightest air of hopefulness.  
  
He sighed, wondering if they'd ever seem like anything but children to him, in spite of their ages. "We don't want to force a confrontation with him, do we? Nor do we want him to discover us or our surveillance. There are other ways to flush Wolverine out of hiding. His error was finally emerging from the shadows - in the light, he is controllable, and therefore weak. Before, he was protected by his nothingness; now, he has something to lose. Much to lose."  
  
They both gave him thousand yard stares, not understanding in the least, but they still betrayed their personalities - Duncan's frosty blue eyes were like perfect mirrors, flat and empty, while Niemi's hazel eyes were hard and cold. Duncan just didn't follow it; Niemi didn't understand why he didn't have Wolverine killed.  
  
But neither of them - even Duncan, who'd been with the Organization for years - really grasped what was going on here, or why Wolverine remained important.  
  
He was not the most powerful mutant around, not by a long shot, but he was the most persistent, and the most perfectly trained. He'd made his name as a weapon of mass slaughter, but there were any dozens of mutants who could do that; that wasn't that special. It was what they didn't know that made him special.  
  
He was the perfect assassin.  
  
And in the classical sense - the sniper from the rooftop, the face in the crowd that just threw away a fast food bag containing two pounds of Semtex and a timer fifty seconds away from detonation into the garbage can on the corner of a crowded street. He was the man you never saw, the man who killed quietly and melted away before you even realized what had happened. In spite of his berserker reputation, he had a true gift for stealth. He could follow a scent for miles, so why hurry? He knew he could always find his prey when he wanted to, and he never had to make a scene about it unless he wanted to.  
  
Perhaps his most impressive kill was on a crowded car in the Paris Metro. Shouldering through the crowd, seemingly on his way out, he simply pressed his hand against the back of his target, extended a single claw, punched through the victim's aorta, and then retracted the claws and shoved through the crowd so fast he was actually a meter or so away before the victim collapsed. Everyone thought it was a heart attack - the gendarmes only realized he'd been stabbed when the blood started pouring out his back, and that was only due to gravity, as he was dead well before the subway even came to a stop.  
  
And what a puzzling crime. No one saw a knife, a struggle, anyone near him who wasn't a random commuter. Even if Wolverine hadn't disappeared into the throng, if they'd have frisked him just at random because he was on the train, they'd never have found a weapon. He didn't need a weapon - he was one.  
  
God, he was good. Infiltration, stalking, surveillance, reading a scene with a clarity that a social scientist and psychologist alike would envy - he was truly gifted. He could make a kill a work of art; there were more unsolved homicides that Wolverine was responsible for than he would ever know. When he wanted to be stealthy, there was no one better. How else had he been able to avoid their detection and actually be believed to be dead for fifteen years? You couldn't teach something like that; it was inborn, ingrained. He was a predator, plain and simple; the two hundred pound tiger that still managed to elude you at every turn.  
  
Which was why he never understood all the other "tinkering" Stryker wanted to do with him. But Stryker had a very unhealthy obsession with him. At first, he thought it was simply repressed sexuality - he couldn't admit to himself he just really wanted to fuck Wolverine, but it may have been another psychological problem at the root of it all: he wanted his son to be like Wolverine, if he had to be a mutie at all. Someone useful and controllable, not the train wreck that his son actually was. There may have been more; huge chunks of Stryker's records had been wiped out, and there were rumors in the upper echelon that he once fucked up major on a mission, and the only thing that managed to save it was ... you guessed it, Wolverine. Perhaps the humiliation led him to devote all that time and energy in humiliating and subjugating Wolverine. No one - especially a mutie - showed him up.  
  
But Stryker was flatline now, and thank god - he'd have had to take that crazy fuck out himself if Wolverine finally hadn't punched his ticket. How they had let him take over the Organization he would never know, except that he had a gift for being a slimy little weasel. He had never mastered the art of sucking up, and in the short run he had paid for it.  
  
Yet, in the long run, the Organization was all his now. Well, in one sense.  
  
The Organization didn't really exist anymore. The one in place had expelled all the mutants, which made no fucking sense at all - Humans alone hunting mutants? Yeah, right, that was going to work. And they'd made things worse by killing the weak ones, the dumb ones, the shallow end of the gene pool - the stronger, smarter mutants had survived, gotten out, and if these fools knew anything about evolution (had they not grasped Darwinism?), they'd know they were just encouraging the future production of stronger, more lethal mutants. That would backfire in a spectacular fashion.  
  
Well, if not for him.  
  
The Human branch, whatever they called it, was of no concern to him. It had no connection to this, this shadow operation, so deeper than black ops there was no appropriate name to give it. He was slowly recruiting mutants to fill in the gaps, help bring things under control, but nothing so ham fisted as brain washing and mind control. There were other ways to make people work for you; better ways.  
  
The task he'd given Ballistic (what a silly name - how Ballistic was firing concussive blasts from your hands? But it was Stryker who insisted on always referring to the muties by their stupid code names - "A non-Human creature doesn't deserve a Human name.") and Niemi was a simple one - blatant daylight attacks, highlighting their mutant abilities. In spite of the change in his appearance, he was sure Logan would recognize Ballistic, and be one of the first to pursue them. It was an operation known in the biz as a "quail flush" - find your target by making him show himself. It worked, but far sooner than intended - who knew Logan (and Cyclops) would be right there, at the scene of the first hit? As far as Ballistic was concerned, that was bad timing.  
  
But he considered it very good luck indeed. With little muss and fuss, they had flushed Logan out almost immediately. The fact that he still hung around Xavier's on a semi-regular basis was a good sign. He was not disappearing, not like he usually did - not like he could. An enemy in a known location was one less enemy to worry about.  
  
"I don't get this," Niemi admitted. "If you don't wanna attack the guy, why are we watching him?"  
  
He smiled at her, almost envying her simplistic outlook on life. With her it was always kiss or kill, right this second; patience, waiting for something, was an almost foreign concept. "In due time. You'll have to trust me, I'm afraid."  
  
"Didn't he used to be good?" She asked, now starting to sound irritated, like a cranky three year old. "I heard he went nuts or somethin'."  
  
"He was okay," Duncan offered, somewhat dismissively. "But he wasn't as great as some make him out to be. I worked with him once - he was a mess."  
  
Niemi eyed him suspiciously, as she had every right to, as Duncan had technically never worked with Logan. A failed candidate for the "Weapon X" modification program, he was once part of a back up team supporting Logan's team on a mission, during Logan's last official days with the Organization. It was quite possible he barked an order at Duncan once the teams converged, but they'd spent no meaningful time together. He could have been a mess, though; Logan's telepathic conditioning was falling apart at the time, and everything they didn't want seeping through into his consciousness was starting to get through again. And those dominoes of fate all fell into place - he was sent for "reconditioning" up at Alkali Lake, and somehow he got loose; this time, the methods weren't good enough to hold him back, and he went on a murderous rampage, leading to the destruction of the base, and his eventual believed death. Even obsessed Stryker came to believe it eventually, assuming no one could escape the detection of the Organization (and specifically him) for that long.  
  
But that was the flaw in Stryker's reasoning. He insisted on thinking Logan was an animal, when in fact he was far more deadly as a cyborg, something he resembled in his cooler, deadlier states; not a living thing at all, but a pure machine, a machine specifically built to survive at any cost. Disappearance was the most primitive - and effective - mode of survival.  
  
The massacre at Alkali Lake was all Stryker's fault anyhow, even though no one would admit it. He was in the rare position to have heard some of the final audio transmissions out of Alkali Lake, before they were destroyed - they were trashed not only because they were of no use or ornament, but many people simply couldn't stomach the last few seconds, where you could actually hear the sound of flesh tearing, and a wet noise generally assumed to be organs falling out near the microphone.  
  
Stryker pushed too far; Logan just snapped. That wasn't Logan as animal, but Logan as a man, completely fucking insane - his mind shattered into a billion different fragments of personalities and memories and thoughts and "voices", a man who could not reconcile being ten thousand different people at once. He tried to layer on one too many things, fucked over Logan's brain until it was little more than oatmeal sloshing inside his skull. Stryker didn't coax out the perfect animal, but the perfect psychopath. What animal was more deadlier than man? Had that never gotten through William's thick skull?  
  
He never believed he was dead. He believed that Logan, insane as he was, had gone to ground, and would be easy to track simply by following the trail of dead he would leave in his wake. But that's where Logan had the last laugh, and the "impossible man" did one more impossible thing: he got over it.  
  
Healing from insanity, especially an induced case like his, was unheard of. Oh sure, with years of therapy and drugs, maybe you could get out into normal society again, but insanity wasn't like a broken arm - it didn't set and heal over a short period of time. And yet, Logan managed just that. In retrospect, it was perfectly logical - no insane animal could survive, it was counterproductive. So, in the name of survival, he shed it like a winter coat. Oh, to be built for pure survival like Wolverine obviously was. What a thing that would be.  
  
"So what's the drill now?" Niemi asked. She couldn't sound more bored if she tried.  
  
"We give him a week," he told her. "If he doesn't reappear, we can put something else in motion."  
  
"More hits?" Duncan asked, perking up.  
  
He sighed and leaned back, glancing up at the bars the sunlight made on the ceiling as it cut through the blinds. They wouldn't understand, nor would he expect them to. "No. Why use a sledgehammer when a scalpel will do?"  
  
Judging from the blank stares, they didn't get it. The people he had to work with.  
  
That's why it would be such a joy to work with Wolverine again.   
  
18  
  
The ocean was as calm and dark as a pool of ink, mirroring the black, starless sky. The crescent moon seemed to float placidly on its surface, like a lost signal flare. This was a beautiful place; a shame it felt so wrong.  
  
The locals called this area - encompassing this slice of beach and swath of jagged cliffs - Mar de Almas, or "Sea of Souls", and believed it to be haunted, which was why it was a rare part of the Northeastern Mexican coast line that was almost wholly undeveloped. Tourist havens bracketed this area miles away, but nothing came near here.  
  
The official reason given was the treacherous nature of the otherwise beautiful sea. Shoals and reefs rose out of the water in great proliferation the closer you came to shore, the moldering bones of dead leviathans, only to be unexpectedly swallowed whole by the water, making them even more treacherous for being hidden beneath the skin of the ocean.   
  
The cliffs that rose on the opposite side were steep and full of scree, worn down by a salty sea and fearsome wind, making the narrow sliver of beach almost inaccessible, at least by standard means. It didn't seem worth the bother and peril of reaching it.  
  
Once again, superstition was used as a protective measure. There were no ghosts here, no lost souls of drowned sailors wandering the cliffs where they had hoped to reach haven and met death instead. The topography of the place said only one thing to Bob - fortress. A natural one, fortified by nature herself, hard to reach and impossible to penetrate without attracting notice.  
  
The reason it felt wrong here - the reason the locals decided to call it "haunted", groping for something to explain the odd feeling that lingered in the air like a subliminal bad smell - was that this place, long ago, had been consecrated in the name of several gods. Mostly Aztec, Incan, and Mayan in nature (if they were ever known at all), this was their mortal plane enclave, away from the mortal pets that so amused them for a little while, until ennui, restlessness, and in fighting led them to abandon this plane (if, indeed, they were still alive or around in any capacity - in fighting between gods could be an extremely nasty thing).  
  
To be consecrated in their name, there was no "holy water", no chants, no liturgical dance (and thank any god for that) - what there was was blood. Rivers of it, oceans, that stained the sand crimson and left striations of rusty brown on the cliff faces, making them look like layers of rock instead of the ghost of slaughters past.  
  
Camaxtli pulled great strength from this area; he fed on blood, on the lingering stain of violent death, and there were about thirty five specific sites in Mexico and Central America that continued to feed him, even though sacrifices hadn't been made in his name for a long time. Once a place was consecrated in his name, it was hard to undo, and who would bother?  
  
Bob made a mental note to hit the spots and undo them as soon as he had the time.  
  
It also helped that the Silencias had obviously constructed a powerful repellant spell, covering this area for a mile in all directions, something that made you skin crawl for no reason and made you want to run away in panic, even though there was no obvious threat. Even the animals had fled.  
  
Bob didn't want to break the spell; it was good that the civilians were gone. Also, to shatter it would undoubtedly attract their attention, and while he knew he'd never be able to get a true drop on them, Bob didn't want them to know he was here as long as possible. So he was a rock in the river of this caustic spell, letting it flow around him without touching.  
  
As a reflexive response, he could feel his own power coming out, oozing out through his pores, giving the world a bright azure hue. He had to keep a tight rein on it, as too much power would attract their attention immediately. He wasn't ready for that, not yet.  
  
They were deep inside a cave in the cliffs, not visible to the naked eye, as was the guard left on duty. But he was looking out towards the horizon, apparently expecting one of the sea gods - traditional opponents of Itchy - to try and disrupt the festivities. Yet that made Bob suspicious - surely Cammy had warned them of him.  
  
He wondered what kind of trap Cammy was expecting to spring on him. Oh well, he had no plans for tonight. 


	11. Part 11

"Lying to yourself again, suicidal imbecile," Bob sang under his breath, looking closely at the negative outline of the guard against the rocks. He wasn't so much invisible as hued exactly to match his background. Not much of a god power, but sometimes you had to make do with what you had. But from here, he could sense he was one of their magic slingers, hence the guard duty. "What'll it take to get it through to you precious, go to this, why do you wanna throw it away like this, such a bitch -"  
  
The guard finally picked up on him, and turned, throwing out his arm and a massive bolt of energy - a dismembering spell. Cute. Too bad it wasn't enough.  
  
Bob simply held out his hands, and caught the energy like it was a lobbed ball. He could feel the malevolent power of the thing make his skin tingle, although that wasn't true - his skin was awash with his own power, blue light dripping off of him like extruded blood. This energy was nothing compared to his, couldn't even begin to break through. He could have absorbed it; he chose not to. "- why do I want to watch you disconnect and self destruct one bullet at a time -" he muttered, as the energy arced back towards it thrower like a shooting star.  
  
He saw it coming, but couldn't react fast enough to do anything about it. And when it slammed into him, he seemed to explode into a million pieces, a melon on the wrong end of a rifle. " - what's your rush now, everyone will have his day to die," Bob finished, as bits of the Silencias kept landing on the beach, falling from the sky like confetti. That was some spell he threw, all right. Nasty.  
  
He had revealed the entrance to the cave at the same time, and he was within about three meters of it when what appeared to a pillar of red fire shot out of it, taking the shape of a dragon's head as it slammed into him and actually sent him sprawling on his ass. It reared over him, seemingly roaring, red fire dripping from its wide jaws.  
  
A manifestation, probably the combined might of many Silencias. It was cute, almost clever. Not enough, but you had to give them points for trying. "Hello dragon, meet George," he said, projecting his own energy out into the shape of a fiery blue sword in his hand.  
  
As he stood up swinging the sword in a perfect arc that would have neatly decapitated the projection, but before it could make contact, the dragon manifestation completely disappeared. "Aw, shit," Bob exclaimed, disappointed. "People planning an apocalypse should not be scaredy pants." Of course, he'd have killed their manifestation and possibly some of them if he made contact, but it still seemed like an unbelievably chickenshit thing to do.  
  
He decided to keep the flaming blue sword, liking the ironic imagery, and entered the cave, bracing for the next hit. "C'mon, show me what you got," he taunted, his voice echoing off the smooth rock walls. It was dark inside, save for some bioluminescent lichen clinging to random spots, but his flaming sword lit his path nicely - yet another reason to keep it. "Don't you wanna try and kick my ass? I can stand in for the disappointingly divine parents who abandoned you! Don't be complete nancies!"  
  
But the deeper he went into the cavern, the less he sensed them - and the more he smelled blood.  
  
He felt a sharp pang of fear as he realized … holy shit, Logan's blood was in there.  
  
"Logan!" He shouted, running down into the darkness.  
  
He knew they would need god blood as part of the ritual to raise Itchy, but it had never occurred to him they would use an avatar in its place - especially his. But it made sense, didn't it? Cammy getting his ultimate fuck you gesture in by using his avatar to bring Itchy back. Bastard! If he hurt Logan, he was going to rip his bloody fucking head off.  
  
His sword flared as brightly as a spotlight, and let him see why there was no further resistance to his approach.  
  
The Silencias had all killed themselves.  
  
The cavern opened up in a wide, circular chamber, hollowed out into a dome shape. On the flat, rocky ground, twenty bodies laid face down in a rough pentagram shape, their mostly red blood pooling into the charred fetish shape, making it sink even deeper into the rock, as if the blood was merely acid.  
  
They had all slashed their own throats - many still holding the sacred blades in their extended hands - for maximum bleed. Their blood, combined with Logan's, would more than be enough to feed Itchy, and bring him back. Cammy had probably promised to resurrect them as Itchy's lackeys, without the problematic weakness of a partially mortal form. He wondered if he was actually going to keep the promise.  
  
Although he smelled his blood, he got no sense of Logan being here, alive or dead, nor did he see him among the bodies. So that was Cammy's trap - he had Logan. Bastard.  
  
The earth started to tremble, mildly at first but quickly growing in intensity, and Bob could feel the dimensional barrier starting to break down. Here came Itchy.  
  
"Oh no you fucking don't!" he shouted, and squelched through the blood to the middle of the pentagram. He dropped to his knees and drove his sword of energy straight down, into the center of the form.  
  
The cave was starting to crumble, huge fissures cracking through the walls and stones started to plummet down from the ceiling - the emergence of Itchy would surely cause the entire cliff side to implode. But why wait for that?  
  
Bob reached out with his energy, found the nascent rift, and threw it open wide - causing the entire cliff to explode around him.  
  
Debris vaporized long before it could reach him, and he never felt the fall to the beach; the chamber simply ceased to be, and he was standing on the beach at the edge of the shore, sword in hand, waiting for Itchy.  
  
And there he was. Among a temple of rubble and body parts, Itchy stumbled out, clearly confused at being ripped out before he could push his way through. His form was that of a naked but sexless humanoid, with ruddy skin, like the flesh was transparent but flush with blood, the blind eyes made of granite, the face flat and strangely lacking a nose, although the mouth was wide and full of jagged stone teeth, honed to knife edges.   
  
"Welcome back to Earth," Bob said facetiously. "Hope you had a good life, 'cause fuck, is it over." And with that, he drove his sword of energy right through Itchy's solar plexus.  
  
He opened his mouth in a pained gasp, and Bob started funneling all his energy into himself, using the sword as a conduit. He wondered if he should someday tell Rogue she wasn't the only one with the gift to do just that. "But take comfort in knowing I'm gonna use your energy to bring Cammy down - you'll still get to kill, just not the things you were aiming for."  
  
Did Cammy think he was the only one who could others? They were all gods here.  
  
And they were all equally damned.  
  
18  
  
Logan woke up on a beach, with the saline smell in his nose, the sun on his cheek, and sand in his beard.  
  
He jolted up, pushing himself up into a sitting position, but as he looked around in disorientation, blinking rapidly, he saw there wasn't much to see.  
  
He was reasonably certain he was back in New York, as it wasn't the most attractive beach in the world; desolate sand stretched towards a horizon filled with buildings that looked like abandoned factories, facades decrepit and eaten away, falling into disrepair with an inevitably  
  
he associated with depressed seaside towns. In a reversal of the laws of physics, the collapse always seemed to come before the neglect.  
  
The sun was warm in the overcast sky, but the wind had a bite of cold to it, and the sea looked choppy but gray, like poorly filtered sewer run off. Even the whitecaps looked a little scummy.  
  
How'd he get here? Better yet, why the fuck was he here? The last thing he remembered was being kidnapped by some magic slinging bastards …  
  
"I freed you," A female voice said behind him.  
  
He looked over his shoulder so fast he almost gave himself whiplash. There she was.  
  
Jean.  
  
Standing only a couple of feet away from him, she was clad in her black X-Man uniform, only the jacket was unzipped, exposing the blood red tank top he never knew she wore. Her hair seemed longer too, a luxurious fall of crimson that beautifully framed her face, and seemed to be calling out to be touched.  
  
But her eyes … damn it, her eyes were still red, full of fire.  
  
"They were going to kill you, Logan, sacrifice you to some god. I think they got some blood, but nothing else - I took you away from them."  
  
He felt dizzy, he felt nauseous, and it had nothing to do with blood loss. "Thank you," he mumbled, feeling cold and numb. He closed his eyes and pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead, almost feeling an ache coming on.  
  
"What's wrong?" She asked, her voice full of concern. "Are you hurt?"  
  
"You're back now?" He asked, and suddenly a song started circling in his mind; a song he'd heard lots of times, thanks to it being one of Bob's personal favorites. It didn't take Logan long to figure it out either; hide behind the song, use it to shelter your thoughts from a telepath. He wondered if Bob had inserted it as another tripwire, or if it was simply something remembered on his own. He knew he had learned to evade telepaths; it was just another thing that was more instinct than memory.  
  
"Yes. Logan, what is it?"  
  
The song hummed in his head, white noise blocking out all other thoughts ("-Drunk on ego, truly thought I could make it right-"), and stood up, barely aware he was shaking. "I'm - I'm a little cold," he said, although he had a feeling that wasn't true.  
  
"Oh god. I'll get us out of here -"  
  
"No, no," he insisted, turning to face her. It was almost painful to look at her, like she was the sun. ("- but you're far too poisoned for me, such a fool to think that I can wake you from your slumber -") "I just-" A tear involuntary slid down his cheek, and on impulse he hugged her, pulling her tightly against him. "Jean," he gasped, breathing in the scent of her hair.  
  
(Her scent was different; altered.)  
  
Her body was radiantly warm, and she hugged him back, as if trying to share her heat. "It's okay," she said soothingly, stroking his hair. When her fingertips brushed the back of his neck, it sent shivers down his spine. "Why does that song keep going around your mind?"  
  
( "-that I could actually heal you. Sleeping Beauty, poisoned and hopeless -")  
  
"You know how it is - a song gets stuck in your brain, and you can't get it out." Partly on impulse, and partly out of need, he kissed her, burying his hand deep in her soft hair. As he had hoped, she didn't shove him away, didn't telepathically reject him, just responded to him with the same intensity. He knew, in her way, Jean did love him.  
  
(She tasted the same. Almost.)  
  
He pulled away from her, and told her, "I love you." And then he moved.  
  
It was so much instinct, so much his knee jerk response to avoiding telepathy, that even he didn't know what he was doing until he did it. He spun away from Jean rapidly, only popping the claws on his right hand in time to make contact with Jean's neck. He completely spun around, back to her, so he did not have to see what he did.  
  
But he heard her head thud down onto the beach, seconds before her body collapsed.  
  
Logan dropped to his knees and screamed - it was a scream of anguish and rage, the sound of a mind starting to fracture like thin ice. It came deep from his solar plexus, scouring his throat raw, and he lifted his bloody claws to the sky, as if pleading for absolution from some god he knew wasn't there. And he would not accept absolution if it was given.  
  
Claws retracting, he let his head fall forward into the sand as sobs ripped out of his body with a violence that made his whole body tremble. It wasn't real; it didn't happen. He didn't do that. As long as he didn't see it, it didn't happen. He kept telling himself that over and over, a mantra sliding into madness.  
  
(He stank of her blood.)  
  
"You did it," an unfamiliar voice said behind him. "I have to admit I wasn't sure you would."  
  
Still shaking, trying hard to swallow his sobs, he looked up to see a shadow now covering him. The shadow of a tall, lean, bronze skinned man , shirtless and clad only in jeans … with bulging eyes of swirling blood, somehow staying within the confines of an invisible bubble growing out of the sockets. He smelled like power, and a somewhat familiar alien scent - the smell that lingered in the back of Jean's scent.  
  
He glared at up the man, possessed of the sudden urge to rip out his fucking throat with his teeth, but he couldn't feel his legs beneath him. You could fool a telepath if you reduced yourself to instinct without thought; that didn't work with a god. "You goddamn motherfucker - this isn't real, is it?" He growled, feeling tears still streaking down his face.  
  
Camaxtli gave him a savage grin, baring teeth as thin and sharp as needles. "I had to see what you would do. You don't think I'd really put my avatar at risk without testing the waters, did you? You're a vicious little Human - I like you."  
  
Logan gulped down his sobs, snarling up at him, the waves of arrogance and blood coming off of him just feeding Logan's already voluminous rage. He made him think he'd killed Jean … for sport. It was a game, a fucking game. "I'm gonna kill you, you fucking bastard. As soon as Bob is finished with you, I'm gonna scatter your fucking entrails to the crows, you lousy piece of shit."  
  
Camaxtli continued to leer down at him and gloat, his amusement and contempt palpable. "I can't believe you hitched your wagon to a loser like Bob. You'd be so much better off working for me. You want to kill, Logan? Do you want to let go of all those inhibitions and just do what you were born to do? I can make that happen. You want Jean? You can have her as often as you'd like - why do I care?"  
  
"Fuck you. Fuck you!"  
  
"It's not really a choice," he told him, folding his arms over his chest. "I can take you any time you want."  
  
Logan panted, unable to breathe through his clogged nose, but he was no enraged he almost couldn't breathe at all. "No you can't," he snarled, only realizing he was right as soon as it was out of his mouth. Yes, yes that was right. "You can't have two avatars at once; you can only have one. You don't even have a world to return to on the Higher Planes. Jean was your only chance for escape."  
  
Camaxtli's bloody eyes narrowed, and Logan knew he had hit a nerve. "Don't you talk to me like that. I am a god, and you will not speak to me -"  
  
"I'll speak to you any fucking way I want," he snapped. "You're not my god." It was then that Logan realized exactly what he should do - there was a way to save Jean, without killing her. His heart raced as he realized what it would cost … but did he care? Saving Jean was all that mattered; he could deal with the consequences later. "Yer a chickenshit, you know that? Bob's got more balls than you."  
  
His eyes narrowed further, and the vessels within them seemed to increase their Brownian motion until they looked like blood tornadoes. "Shut your mouth, insect."  
  
"Bob at least avatared a killer - but you? A so called war god, you took a pacifist, a Doctor for fuck's sake. You'll have to hide within her own fucking mind like a repressed memory. And you said I was inhibited." The song continued to circle around in his head - definitely a tripwire.  
  
"I control this reality, maggot," he said, as the sky turned black, clouds roiling like living things being boiled alive. "Watch your tongue, or I'll rip it out."  
  
"Take me," he growled, swallowing back bile. He was terrified, but he let his own anger barely cover the surface of it. If he was right, Camaxtli was like a rapist or torturer who got off on the defiance of his victims; it gave him more incentive to "break" them, bend them to his will. He was a shithead little sadist, a god for the limp dicked predators who could only take on those that were so far weaker that the outcome of any fight was never in doubt. He was a war god - war preyed especially on the weak. What had someone once said? War was cruelty? That was probably doubly true of the war gods.  
  
"What?" But Camaxtli was smiling now, showing the tips of those needle teeth.  
  
"Take me, you vicious little shit," he said, and made sure that Camaxtli could see he was trembling - but now it was out of pure, murderous rage. "Let her go, and take me as your avatar instead. I'm already a killer; in fact, I'm fucking great at it. You don't need to force me at hurt anything - I was made to do that. And how much more could you fuck over Bob if you stole his avatar right out from under his nose?"  
  
Camaxtli's leer grew to savage proportion, threatening to split his entire face in half. Light seemed to glow through the blood of his eyes. He was loving this idea - and this scenario - more and more. "All for her? You haven't even fucked her yet."  
  
"Eat me." He couldn't avatar two people at once; he would have to make a choice. One or the other. He just had to make himself the more attractive target.  
  
"You know what I could do to you, Mister Nobility? I could make you kill her - I could make you kill all your family and friends. I could make you kill Bob."  
  
"Leave her out of it, and you can use me to kill the whole fucking planet," he snarled. "But I'll kill you one day, you fucking son of a bitch. Count on it." The continued defiance was just added spice to the stew.  
  
He knew torturers, sadists - he'd spent his life being broken by them, molded … not that it did them good for long. But they liked to crush the bugs, see them squirm under heel - and what sadistic god could resist breaking down a mere Human who spit in their face?  
  
Logan knew very well he might not come back from this - in fact, he hoped Bob killed him before Camaxtli could do much damage. But Jean would be free of him, and maybe that was all that mattered.  
  
He didn't have to kill her. He just had to be tortured and die for her … which was probably fair enough. He hoped she understood; he hoped the Boy Scout treated her right.  
  
He wondered if anyone would miss him when he was gone.  
  
"You're terrified," Camaxtli said approvingly.  
  
He glowered up at him, flop sweat falling into his eyes, and he snarled, baring his slightly lengthened canines just for effect. It really wasn't an act - he detested this sick son of a bitch, this casual manipulator who kidnapped Jean and made her a prisoner without her knowledge, this murderer who was little more than a vampire god for feeding off of it.  
  
They were both killers - they deserved each other. And it was clear, from the way his face seemed to glow, that Camaxtli was beginning to see that.  
  
"I adapted to Bob's energy," he snarled, throwing more fuel on the fire of Camaxtli's avarice. "I'll adapt to your too."  
  
"No you won't," he replied, his smile confident and patronizing. "Bob held back, not wanting to hurt his little bitch. I'd never hold back, slug."  
  
"You couldn't hurt me, asshole; I'm beyond pain." He had to be careful here - lay the bullshit on too thick, and he'd know he was being manipulated.  
  
But maybe he already did; maybe he didn't care.   
  
Camaxtli crouched down, so he'd be at his eye level, and reached out and grabbed Logan's chin. He wanted to pull away, but of course he was completely frozen now, unable to move, barely able to seethe. Logan was starting to hate the reek of his own panic, but there was nothing he could do about it. His animal brain was rebelling at the idea of volunteering for slavery and torture - he'd been through it several times already, and his brain was screaming "No more!" But he couldn't listen. He had to ignore what little shred of self-preservation he had. This was for Jean; it had to count for something. If he did nothing good in his life, let him do this.  
  
"Oh, my little insect, I can show you pain you never could have imagined if you lived for one thousand years," Camaxtli told him, his chest puffing up with glee. He was enjoying this. His needle teeth sparkled in the dim light.  
  
"You talk big, motherfucker," he spat. "But you haven't showed me shit yet."  
  
If a shark could smile, it would look like him. He was the evil Cheshire cat, something gone horribly wrong. All Logan could see were his teeth and his bloody eyes.  
  
And he could do nothing but wait for Camaxtli to make up his mind.  
  
____  
  
The End -   
  
To Be Continued  
  
(I'm an incredibly evil bastard, aren't I? I'm sorry…) 


End file.
